On weekends OpenInfra Summit Europe in Paristhe whole day was dedicated to VMware migration. Open source developers lined up throughout the day to demonstrate how their products could be used to migrate VMware virtual machines to open source alternatives.
As noted by Jimmy MacArthur, OpenInfra's director of business development, Broadcom's acquisition of VMware resulted in changes in software license pricing, resulting in many existing VMware customers experiencing significant increases in VMware's annual operating costs. He warned that when a supplier of key IT infrastructure software has such leverage, it could easily happen again.
While this is entirely possible for IT departments with a VMware alternative such as Nutanix's AHV or the open source Proxmox virtual environment, in the VMware Migration Day keynote MacArthur discussed the OpenStack approach, which relies on multiple open source products: “The Way OpenInfra has an ecosystem of partners providing a healthy open source alternative.”
Naveen Chhabra, principal analyst at Forrester, said: “At the time of the acquisition, customers were very worried and anxious, then they became angry and felt intimidated. The most important element that I found in my conversations with VMware customers is that there was a breach of trust.”
Chhabra is the lead author of a recent Forrester report. Benefit from the VMware Revolution report. In a report, Forrester analysts note that for many years VMware has been de facto on-premises virtualization provider. Forrester recommended that IT departments with significant investments in on-premises VMware infrastructure consider using a different hypervisor vendor.
Before VMware users start looking for alternative virtualization platforms, Chhabra recommended that they first identify their key business areas. workloads that require VMware licenses. “Without going into the specifics of the technologies, I'm sure you'll find that there are some that don't require you to use VMware,” he said.
The changes made to VMware licensing are being used by the OpenInfra Foundation and the broader open source community to illustrate why it is important for IT departments to avoid standardization on a single technology platform.
Johan Christenson, founder and head of innovation at Cleura, said: “We've centralized data like crazy lately and forgotten some of the basics. It's about not having all our eggs in one basket.”
Cleura provides public, open source infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and is a member of EuroStack, a group of 300 European companies working on what it calls “a strategic plan for an integrated, sovereign and interoperable European digital infrastructure.”
Among the group's goals is to reduce Europe's dependence on non-European technology suppliers. Given VMware's dominance in European data centers, Christenson acknowledged that functionality gaps could emerge as IT departments consider replacing it with open source alternatives.
“[However,] “It depends on how you look at it: if you're open source, you can close those gaps,” he said, adding that he acknowledges there are likely to be larger gaps. “We need to continue to move forward with open source to provide these capabilities.”
While companies supporting OpenStack have joined forces to offer server virtualization to IT leaders who no longer consider VMware and Broadcom to be long-term technology providers in their organization, the OpenInfra Foundation is aware of the challenges it faces.
For example, the flexibility and modularity of OpenStack comes with increased complexity at the outset. The migration guide recognizes that managing and maintaining an OpenStack environment can be more complex than installing VMware, which is often more streamlined and user-friendly. The OpenInfra Foundation noted that this complexity can lead to longer initial deployment times and longer training times for administrators.
