Migrating from VMWare: Managing Cost and Complexity Challenges

VMware is an industry leading provider of Cloud and Virtualisation software. In 2023, VMware was acquired by Broadcom and subsequently implemented changes to their licensing model. Following these changes, the majority of their 500,000 customers have reported an increase in cost, with a sizable portion of customers claiming costs have risen by over 50%. This resulted in many customers having to reassess their long-term financial sustainability. It is expected that over the next 2 years over 35% of existing workloads will be migrated away from VMware.

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Evaluating Migration Options

Choosing a migration target is a daunting task that requires careful analysis and a deep understanding of an organisation’s requirements and the features on offer from various competing platforms.  Organizations must weigh several factors, including enterprise support needs, deployment environments, and the choice between a full or partial workload migration. Key alternatives that can potentially serve as VMware replacements include but are not limited to: Hyper-V, OpenShift Virtualization, OpenStack, Proxmox, oVirt and Nutanix AHV.

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Case Study: A Strategic Shift to OpenStack

For one intive customer, this migration process began in 2024. Ultimately, this customer chose OpenStack to replace VMware, as they wished to maintain their own private cloud utilising open-source software and minimise licensing requirements and vendor lock-in. Realising the difficulty of the task ahead of them and recognising the need for strong technical competency to successfully complete their migration, this customer brought a team of intive engineers on board to carry out the migration.

This team was tasked with migrating over one hundred VMs, including developer environments and a large legacy CI pipeline.  

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Navigating Technical Debt and Deadlines

The migration process itself was far from straightforward. Significant technical debt and compatibility issues prevented a direct “lift-and-shift” solution, forcing the engineering team to adopt a more strategic approach. They executed a rolling migration strategy, incrementally porting components while running parallel robustness tests to maintain system stability and ensure uninterrupted software delivery throughout the transition. The team ensured there were mitigation strategies in place to manage any components that could not be migrated before the deadline - the customers VMware license expiration date.

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‍Achieving Long-Term Stability and Flexibility  

Utilising intive’s expertise, the customer completed the migration before their VMware licenses expired while suffering minimal disruption to regular operations. Their new setup not only avoids the licensing costs that were the original motivation for moving over but also boasts increased robustness and a greater level of flexibility and extensibility.

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Strategic Support for Your Migration

With so many other organisations currently looking to move away from VMware, intive remains ready to assist with deep domain knowledge in automation and cloud infrastructure. We ensure companies can continue to improve their software delivery process without the burden of unpredictable costs.

If you are considering a similar transition or need a technical assessment of your current infrastructure, please get in touch with us for a consultation.

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