During the weekend of the OpenInfra Summit Europe in Paris, a whole day was dedicated to VMware migration. Open source developers lined up throughout the day to showcase how their products could be used to migrate VMware virtual machines to open source alternatives.
As Jimmy McArthur, director of business development at OpenInfra, noted, the Broadcom acquisition of VMware has led to software licence price changes, which have resulted in many existing VMware customers seeing a significantly increased annual VMware operating cost. He warned that when a provider of key IT infrastructure software has this kind of leverage, this could easily happen again.
While it is entirely possible for IT departments with an alternative to VMware, such as the AHV from Nutanix or the open source Proxmox Virtual Environment, in the opening keynote of the VMware Migration Day, McArthur discussed the OpenStack approach, which relies on multiple open source products: “The OpenInfra way has an ecosystem of partners providing a healthy open source alternative.”
Naveen Chhabra, principal analyst at Forrester, said: “At the time of acquisition, customers were very concerned and anxious, then they were angry and felt intimidated. The most important element that comes out in my conversation with VMware clients is that there is a breach of trust.”
Chhabra is the lead author of Forrester’s recent Capitalize the VMware disruption report. In the report, the Forrester analysts point out that, for years, VMware has been the de facto on-premise virtualisation provider. Forrester recommended that IT departments with significant investment in VMware on-premise infrastructure should consider using another hypervisor provider.
Before VMware users start looking for alternative virtualisation platforms, Chhabra recommended that they first identify the key business workloads which require VMware licences. “Without getting into the specifics of technology, I’m sure you will find there are several that don’t need to use VMware,” he said.
The changes made to VMware licensing are being used by the OpenInfra Foundation and the wider open source community to illustrate why it is important for IT departments to avoid standardising on a single technology platform.
Johan Christenson, founder and head of innovation at Cleura, said: “We’ve centralised data like crazy lately and have forgotten about some of the basics. It’s a matter of making sure that not all eggs are in one basket.”
Cleura provides open source-based public infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and is a member of EuroStack, a group of 300 European businesses which is working on what it describes as “a strategic blueprint for a comprehensive, sovereign and interoperable European digital infrastructure”.
Among the goals of the group is to reduce Europe’s reliance on non-European technology providers. Given VMware’s dominance in European datacentres, Christenson acknowledged that as IT departments look at replacing it with open source alternatives, there may be gaps in functionality.
“[However,] it depends on how you view this – if you engage in open source, you can cover those gaps,” he said, adding that he recognised that there likely to be more significant gaps. “We need to continue to push forward with open source to provide those capabilities.”
While the companies supporting OpenStack, have joined forces to offer server virtualisation to heads of IT who no longer see VMware and Broadcom as long-term technology providers in their organisation, the OpenInfra Foundation recognises the challenges it faces.
For instance, OpenStack’s flexibility and modularity come with increased upfront complexity. Its migration guide recognises that managing and maintaining an OpenStack environment can be more challenging than a VMware setup, which is often more streamlined and user-friendly. OpenInfra Foundation noted that this complexity can lead to longer initial deployment times and a learning curve for administrators.
