The start of the great virtualization migration?

Sponsored Feature Last November, there were a lot of virtual shivers running down the spines of IT managers around the world.

They came as the news emerged that Broadcom – which made its reputation as a networking hardware company – was finally closing its 18-month-long, $69 billion deal to acquire the highly respected VMware virtualization software franchise.

VMware has built its reputation on placing high-quality software in one form or another in more than 90 percent of all datacenters globally according to some estimates. But its customers were worried: How was everything going to change with the new ownership? Would long-agreed licensing deals be upturned and renegotiated? Would any of the products they use be dropped from the platform? And what price hikes, if any, could be expected?

And if any of these scenarios should come to pass, how easy and cost effective would it be for those organizations negatively impacted by the Broadcom changes to shift their workloads into alternative, software-defined platforms.

Re-evaluating three-to-five-year plans

Broadcom has already made a number of significant changes to its VMware subsidiary following the acquisition. These include a consolidation of product offerings which has seen multiple components streamlined into two primary bundles: VMware Cloud Foundation and VMware vSphere Foundation. This simplifies the licensing structure but may lead to increased costs for customers who previously used standalone products.

The company has also made alterations to its partner program, having terminated existing partner agreements with VMware resellers and service providers and requiring them to reapply under a new program with stricter requirements. The net effect of this could be to disrupt customer relationships and access to favorable licensing terms.

What caused the biggest shock wave were the changes in perpetual licenses, however.Broadcom originally said it would cease selling new perpetual licenses and transition entirely to subscription-based licensing. But in April, CEO Hock Tan did a U-turn, seeing that the customer response was too negative. He reinstated the perpetual licenses, but it’s always possible that the company may move back to its original plan in the future.

Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami told a tech publication last March that many VMware customers continue to have doubts about whether VMware will remain the right long-term platform for them. He told Computer Weekly about reports that customers are uncomfortable with VMware’s direction, noting that although they have long relied on its software to run mission-critical systems, they are “not in a happy place.”

So things indeed have changed in a big way for multiple thousands of VMware users. And the upheaval caused by the Broadcom takeover has forced many enterprises to take a fresh look at their IT ops and consider new alternatives.

“As enterprises are now evaluating their three-to-five-year infrastructure planning – that’s what Broadcom is forcing right now – the economics have changed,” said Lee Caswell, SVP of Product and Solutions Marketing at Nutanix and himself a former longtime VMware product executive.

A shift to a hybrid, multicloud environment

San Jose, Calif.-based Nutanix was an early pioneer in the development of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solutions, having built a unified data management platform that integrates server, storage, virtualization, and networking into a software-defined solution. That platform represents a viable alternative to existing VMware solutions, either as a direct replacement or as a supplement in enterprise environments where a phased migration and consolidation approach that shifts more on-premises workloads into the cloud makes more sense.

“So they (VMware customers) start thinking about that and about a modern infrastructure: That means server-based, software-defined,” Caswell said. “That’s quite different from what users had in the past, which were proprietary ‘refrigerator boxes.’

“Now they start thinking, well, what could I do? Number one: consolidating platforms. So let’s say I have separate files, a separate files team and storage. I have a database team and an objects team. Now I can consolidate those onto a single platform. This is actually a really important thought process for how you simplify and do more with the same or even fewer people than you had today.”

The second thought users have is: How about connecting across the cloud? Caswell said. “If I can consolidate platforms, then I could extend my architecture into the cloud, because the cloud is based on servers – so our software that runs in an on-premises environment can also run in the cloud. We define hybrid as a single endpoint to or from a single cloud,” he said.

What about connecting to multiple clouds? “Now they have this idea of an integrated, hybrid, multi-cloud environment,” Caswell said. “That becomes super-important. And finally: What about running all these new applications? How do I take generative AI and containers and bring those into our architecture for a lot of companies? They’re like, ‘Hey, if I have to have separate teams for all these things, for files and blocks and objects, and for on-prem and the cloud, and now for VMs and containers, I run out of people pretty quickly.’

“So if you can go and assimilate all of this, that’s the power of a platform.”

Nutanix’s centralized data management approach

Nutanix Cloud Platform aims to give users the ability to run their workloads with the security and data protection they require while avoiding the inference costs which often come with public cloud deployments. It standardizes Kubernetes to simplify hybrid cloud infrastructure environments while providing a choice of development tools.

“What many people also don’t realize is that Nutanix also has a mature hypervisor with 10 years of development and 1,000+ supported deployments,” Caswell said. “VMware users will be happy to hear that.”

Being able to rebalance workloads across core, on-premises infrastructure and public cloud platforms without major refactoring or licensing overheads can also be a huge plus.

Data management centralization too is likely to become increasingly important due to the rapid proliferation of GenAI applications. In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2027, 75 percent of businesses will use generative AI to create synthetic customer data used in various next-gen apps – up from below 5 percent only one year ago. This expansion is attributed to the increasing application scope of technologies, such as text-to-image, text-to-video conversion, and the modernization of workflows across various industries.

Synthetic customer data is artificial data that statistically mimics real customer data. It’s created using algorithms and machine-learning models that are trained on actual customer data to capture the patterns, distributions, and correlations within the original dataset. Handling this requires fast and efficient next-gen tools.

Nutanix has an “app” for that. The company’s GPT-in-a-Box solution is designed to provide users with a consistent set of tools, data services, and best practices to speed up development and use of AI applications. This vastly reduces operational complexity and costs compared to a multi-vendor approach, says the company, with consolidation like this being what drives development efficiency.

GPT-in-a-Box also enables users to bring their own large language model (LLM) and run it on GPU-enabled clusters for private data use cases, such as healthcare and financial services. GPU-enabled clusters can help greatly with AI development, particularly with large public language models, such as Hugging Face and others, Caswell adds.

“NVIDIA, of course, is a partner for GPUs, and then we also have Dell, HPE, Cisco, Lenovo, working with them to make sure you can get GPU-enabled clusters right,” he said.

Simple VMware to Nutanix migration

Given the increasing consternation caused by the Broadcom/VMware merger, Nutanix has thought through exactly how users can make the transition to its platform most efficiently. The company is offering specialized toolkits for various vertical use cases, for example, and can connect users with the right dedicated partners and professional services. It also provides training and certification resources.

Both promotions have specific terms and conditions, including eligibility requirements and deadlines. It’s recommended to review carefully the details on the respective links provided to determine if you qualify and to understand the full scope of the benefits offered.

For many customers, the first topic of conversation is inevitably ‘what about Broadcom?’. But they also want to know if Nutanix can help them manage risk and handle new technologies like GenAI and containers.

“VMware is not going to go away,” Caswell said. “But what we’re finding is that customers are going to constrain the investment they have, contain their risk on that element, and then do everything new with modern infrastructure. That gives them the flexibility and agility to go and have a cloud-like operating model and even integrate with the cloud, and use the newest applications.”

Sponsored by Nutanix. (Nutanix is not affiliated with VMware by Broadcom or Broadcom).