Datacenter and On-Premises Decisions: What should I do now after the VMware acquisition by Broadcom?

VMware Changes

If you haven’t been reading the tech news lately, as of February 5th, VMware has changed its licensing models and pricing for all VMware products after the Broadcom acquisition.  You will no longer be able to purchase individual products. They have now all been combined into bundles.  Additionally, many products and licensing models you might be familiar with have been removed.  Lastly, many CSPs who hosted VMware environments for customers are losing access to their VMware licensing due to the minimum number of core licenses they must now purchase.  This may have unknown consequences for their ability to continue hosting customer environments. 

For some customers, these changes may be welcome. Many of the packages that you wanted to purchase may become more accessible with the new bundles.  For other customers, the changes in pricing or the removal of key products may cause you to rethink your on-premise architecture and cloud initiatives. And for the remaining customers, the impacts may require full architecture redesigns that go beyond just their on-premise infrastructure. 

VMware considerations to decide what next

This article isn’t to sway you to stay with VMware or not.  That is ultimately your decision. It is to get you thinking about everything outside of your hypervisor that is needed in your environment, how keeping or replacing VMware may impact products and your environment and what options you might have moving forward.

1. What does your environment contain?

When thinking about the various aspects of your environment, you may think of it as simply just VMware and VMs.  For some customers it may be that simple, for others, that barely scratches the surface. 

When deciding to replace your Hypervisor, think of all the products you’ve purchased to manage, monitor, and maintain it.  You’ll have a backup software that integrates with it.  You’ll have monitoring software to alert you if there are issues with it.  You may have an automation package that performs routine tasks for you. And, of course, you’ll have hardware that hosts it.  All of these have been hand selected and tested by you to work with your environment and provide you the functionality that you and your business require.  Changing a hypervisor can touch each and every one of these products/integrations.  You may be able to change hypervisors easily and with little impact to the products you own or your environment may be so tightly integrated that replacement of it is the only option. 

2. What about those vendor appliances? 

Many manufacturers have replaced their hardware with easy to deploy virtual appliances.  They are quick to deploy, provide the functionality you need and, unfortunately, may only be deployed and supported on a specific Hypervisor.  You’ll need to bring these into the equation, as some may provide alternative means of deployment or be replaced with a product supported under a different hypervisor. 

3. What about cloud?

If you bought VMware on cloud, what would happen to that environment? You’ll have to review the new licensing guidelines from VMware around those changes and have discussions with your cloud provider on how those changes will affect you.  If you own an on-prem cloud integration tool that allows you to migrate VMs easily from your hypervisor into the cloud, changing your hyper-visor may impact that integration. 

These new changes will require thinking about how you handle cloud going forward.  You could possibly move your entire on-premise environment to the cloud.  Maybe you change the on-premise hypervisor and that new hypervisor already supports a cloud migration tool or it may not.  Anything is possible.  Ultimately how you flex to and from the cloud may be affected by these new changes and will need to be added into the discussion. 

4. What about software support?

Many of the software products that your environment supports may require their product to be run on VMware.  If these products are critical to your environment and the software provider won’t support another hypervisor, how would you handle that? 

If you do decide to change your hypervisor, you could possibly keep a smaller cluster of VMware to support just these specific machines.  Maybe the provider can migrate you from your on-premises install to a SaaS based service or maybe it can be redeployed in the cloud.  Each one of these packages will need to be reviewed to determine how they can be handled based on the changes that need to occur in your environment. 

5. What about hosting companies?

With the new licensing scheme affecting CSPs, reach out to your provider and ask about how they are being affected by the changes.  If they are large enough, there may be no effects on your environment but if the cloud provider is smaller and they are unable to accommodate the new minimum license requirements, you may find that your environment needs to be rehomed and that timeline may be short.  Having those discussions sooner rather than later will help determine what needs to be done and how soon it needs to be accomplished.

Final Words

Unfortunately, these licensing changes affect everyone that uses VMware.  You will be one of many customers who need to have the discussion, “WHAT DO WE DO WITH OUR ENVIRONMENT?!” And whether that discussion is today, tomorrow or next year, understanding how those changes impact your environment and all the things in it should be a top priority.  

How Can Burwood Help?

Burwood’s experts have researched all the viable hypervisor replacements on the market today, from commercial products to open source and others. The Burwood team is ready to join in those discussions and provide experts to help you decide the path forward for your environment.  

And, no matter what your final decision is, Burwood will provide the support and assistance in redesigning, architecting and implementing your final plan.

---