Broadcom-VMware, or the datacenter cleanup you've been avoiding

Since the early 2000s, IT departments have been living in abundance. An abondance of machines. Virtual ones, that is.

The then-new possibility of cramming and managing several virtual machines (VMs) into a single physical computer - brought mainly by VMware's technology - led to a sudden growth in VM-based apps.

This was because CAPEX budgets for physical infrastructure kept being renewed, while at the same time the demand for business apps was growing exponentially as software was eating the world.

Suddenly, a single SysAdmin could easily manage in the range of 300 VMs alone with the new virtualization tools at his disposition.

In mid-size to large companies, this 20-year conjecture led to VM sprawl, whereby VMs that were created freely and without governance were allowed to occupy and remain in the datacenter whether or not the software residing on it was redundant, financially-unjustifiable or even abandoned, amounting to significant amounts of waste in digital resources, physical assets, datacenter real estate and power.

Most datacenters - and the cloud too - contain significant amounts of waste in digital resources, physical assets, datacenter real estate and power.

Later, an early attempt at creating microservices with VMs (rather than containers) contributed even further to that sprawl. Today, this situation would be embarrassing to many IT shops if it were to be exposed.

Incidentally, that is precisely the time that Broadcom chose to acquire VMware and shock the world with a new subscription-based licensing, suddenly exposing new costs to the corporate C-suite. "Unfair," many will say, looking at their inflated invoices. I say: it's about time.

Now is the time to clean-up and re-assess what lies in the datacenter

It is time to do the big spring clean-up and get rid of all the dead wood in the datacenter. It is time to account for the full costs in power, licensing and management of each app in relation to its business value. And finally, it is time to re-evaluate if VMware's virtualisation technology - which still provides tremendous value in datacenter density, management and security - is still the right option for your business among the several other competing options.

At Dell Technologies, I am asked to advise customers of all sizes who are re-evaluating their choice of virtualisation technology and wish to compare different alternatives. But I find that a full answer goes well beyond a presales customer call discussing comparative pricing of 2 or three IT architecture refresh scenarios.

Rather, a full evaluation should be conducted and vetted by the business itself, ideally with the help of a virtualisation-neutral trusted advisor.

For this, my colleagues at Dell (tks Mike O'Neill, MBA, PMP? ) have created a new service offering to that effect: For a nominal fee, the Quick Start Service will narrow down a business' hypervisor options based on Technical and Business requirements, and issue you a report with actionable recommendations. ?

This is not a luxury, given the spread of new alternatives on the market and the strategic financial impact on any business. Talk to your Dell rep.

And so in many cases the status quo may prevail. Only this time there should be a governance framework around it. A governance framework that explains and establish the choice of hypervisor technology for a given business, and explicitly accounts for its full costs and the expected financial return of each apps.

Oh, and BTW a clean-up is likely still in order, regardless.? ;)

?Pat, #iwork4dell

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