When Broadcom announced its intention to purchase VMware in 2022, industry analysts began fielding calls from worried customers. Cost rises, uncertainty around platform changes and how they could impact existing investments and customer support, and the potential to become tied to mandatory software bundle upgrades, were just some of the concerns.
Ahead of the sale completion in November 2023, Forrester predicted that up to 20% of customers could migrate from VMware during 2024. Broadcom has followed with significant pricing, licensing, and portfolio changes, that have done little to alleviate customer fears, even as it extended support for vSphere 7.0 for 6 months. These changes include:
- Ending the VMware partnership program to transition to an invite-only scheme for resellers and providers. This could require a change of critical infrastructure or provider for end customers.
- An end to the perpetual software licensing contracts potentially resulting in increased customer costs.
- A shift in focus to a private cloud software enterprise offering based on VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF).
Assessing your Options
Given VMware’s reach, these cost and infrastructure concerns will impact many organizations. If you are affected, you should talk with Broadcom or your channel partner directly to understand the extent of the changes for your organization. If you then decide to explore alternative options to VMware several vendors offer tools to assist enterprises with their move. Nutanix for example, uses the enterprise-grade Nutanix Move.
- Multi-cloud or hybrid cloud environments, or those wishing to migrate from a physical to a virtual environment.
- Complex application dependencies.
- Shared storage requirements for data-heavy loads or redundancy requirements that include continuous levels of replication.
- Legacy systems or specific database migration needs not supported by certain vendor migration tools.
- Highly regulated environments governing data storage and handling, particularly for large organizations in highly regulated sectors such as finance and healthcare, with a presence spanning multiple countries.
Reducing the Risk of a VMware to Nutanix migration
Assessing and Planning a Complex Migration
In such a complex environment you’ll need more than the vendor tool to mitigate risks. We advise anyone wanting to manage a complex migration to do the following:
- Run a comprehensive risk assessment. Analyze your environment by compiling an inventory of your existing VMware infrastructure, and mapping dependencies across your entire environment.
- Identify VMware infrastructure that is regularly underutilized and marry this with future needs to understand if you can gain cost improvements by changing your VMware licensing structure or moving to a new vendor infrastructure.
- Run pilot projects in a new vendor environment (if that’s the direction you want to take) to test in the new environment.
All of this will take time. There’s a good chance that the data you need for your risk assessment, for example, must be taken from many sources, requiring you to integrate and normalize data manually. It will also involve multiple spreadsheets and people. Manual human input can lead to human error and further risks including program delays and added costs.
Migrating to a new vendor environment
If you want to migrate to a new vendor, scheduling will take time, as project teams work with stakeholders to understand critical company periods to avoid. Communicating change to those impacted will also drain the time of project management teams, as will the decommissioning and disposal of old equipment (managed in-house or by a third party) and all the reporting that must be managed along the way. It’s also vital to incorporate all relevant industry and country data regulations at every stage to maintain governance and compliance.
The time and risks of managing a project of this size can be a barrier to change – and that’s exactly what Broadcom will hope for. But there are options to escape vendor lock-in. If you choose the right technology partner and capabilities, you can benefit from an accelerated and simplified migration. Here are some tips on the capabilities to look out for:
- System integration: allowing you to rapidly connect to all data repositories and automate the data normalization process.
- Data intelligence: Giving you access to actionable data and allowing you to clearly identify risks and plot a migration path using wave planning.
- Automation: The ability to use system data to trigger automated tasks end-to-end across your systems to manage the migration, including dependency mapping, testing, execution, communications, scheduling, equipment decommissioning, and reporting.
- Data Governance: The ability to integrate and implement relevant data regulations to govern activities based on industry and country-level requirements.
Download the ReadyWorks 2-page guide to understand how you can benefit from these capabilities and contact us to discuss your migration options.
