Nearly a year has passed since Broadcom completed its acquisition of VMware. Yet many companies are still wrestling with what to do in the wake of the deal and Broadcom’s subsequent VMware licensing model changes, which dramatically reduced the number of available licensing bundles and led many customers’ VMware licensing costs to skyrocket.
It’s now the fourth quarter, when many companies are planning their 2025 budgets, and this far more costly line item may serve as an unpleasant reminder of this new state of affairs.
With fewer bundles to choose from, companies’ ability to select the features and functions they need has been diminished. VMware users have found themselves drawn into bundles with features they don’t really use and facing far more costly – in some cases tripled – licensing fees.
But you can’t just snap your fingers and refactor your application base. So, at least for the initial turn of the wheel, companies will have to stick with their current approaches and technology.
However, some organizations may be thinking that they want to be in a different position next time their licenses come up for renewal. If your company is one of them, consider this.
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Explore the possibility of shifting some applications to containers
Moving more of your application base from virtual machines (VMs) to containers is one option.
Most companies that head in this direction will continue using VMware to some extent; they’ll just move some significant percentage, maybe 75%, of their applications to run on containers.
But before you make the move to containers, be aware that running Kubernetes is a non-trivial exercise. Google did it, but few companies have the technical resources that Google possesses.
If you decide to shift your applications to containers, adopt an open hybrid cloud platform from a company such as Canonical, Red Hat or SUSE that packages up most of what you will need.
Understand container migration is a journey, not an individual event
But then you still need to get your application from VMs to containers. For some applications, migration is very straightforward; for others, this movement can be extremely challenging.
VMs and containers are fundamentally different constructs. The way containers consume storage and persistent data, and their recovery and ephemerality, is based on a distinct model.
So, in addition to standing up a canned container distribution, you will need a partner to:
- help you with the infrastructure itself,
- assist you in figuring out which of your applications are good candidates for containerization and then migrating them to containers, and
- construct a viable set of site reliability engineering (SRE) operational runbooks and procedures for how to manage and secure your containerized environment.
Think about whether it makes sense to opt for a different brand of VM
You also have the option of sticking with the VM construct but using a different supplier including one of the open suppliers like Red Hat, SUSE and/or Canonical, all of which offer both open-source VM, usually KVM, and container technologies. There are also proprietary suppliers like Nutanix, which provides a VM alternative with its own hyperconverged infrastructure.
Having a choice of platforms increases your flexibility and leverage in changing business and supplier conditions and can help you mitigate disadvantageous changes from existing suppliers.
The bottom line is that even in a cloudy environment, vendor lock-in can and does exist across every element of the estate. Vendor lock in could be benign, but it could turn malignant.
Position yourself for the best possible hybrid cloud experience
Hybrid cloud has won the cloud wars, making it the preferred architecture for enterprises, including financial services firms – my area of focus. In the last year or two, it has become clear that Fortune 1000 financial services firms aren’t going to be 100% in the public cloud. Why?
One reason is that it’s simply more expensive to run some applications in the public cloud than on premises. Additionally, some applications should run on prem due to data privacy and regulatory requirements. Plus, some applications are simply poorly constructed for the public cloud. For example, the applications that run several trillion dollars in treasuries a night through a mainframe are never going to run in the public cloud. Financial services firms probably don’t have the source code to do that even if they wanted to migrate them to the cloud.
All this means that banks, financial services firms and other enterprises will continue to invest in their on-prem IT estates, which are increasingly cloudy and frequently include VMware VMs. So, these businesses will want to find and embrace the technologies, suppliers and other partners that provide them with the best possible experiences – at the price points that work for them.
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