Virtualization: Remastered and remixed
I can't believe I'm writing this headline, but here we are. And no, I'm not talking about 2025 being the year of the Linux desktop (sorry). As we are finishing up 2024 one of the hottest topics in information technology for this year has been market forces that have upended the virtualization space. If you're unfamiliar with what I'm referring to, the big thing that happened in late 2023 was the recent Broadcom acquisition of VMware .
IT leaders have since initiated a forcing function to re-evaluate their investment in VMware as the product’s roadmap and procurement methods have been both volatile and variable.?This uncertain future has been driven by Broadcom’s elimination of perpetual licenses, cancellation of partner selling, exponential pricing renewal estimates, and company layoffs. CIOs are now quickly directing their teams to investigate their risk posture and dependence on VMware solutions, and request potential alternatives based on recent market changes.
Effects of the acquisition
Most enterprises that currently pay for VMware products are experiencing some level of sticker shock at renewal, with very little time to react. If you are a current long-time VMware administrator you have to be feeling a little bit nervous.
The bad news: Pointy-haired bosses in boardrooms are making sweeping decisions on their 2025 renewal budgets right now. Their already large spend to VMware is potentially becoming exponentially more expensive to Broadcom and their need to "shut off the tap" for quick relief must also be balanced with more longer-term modernization efforts. Given this is largely an all-or-nothing decision for leaders, this means that a completely new virtualization platform may be required. Although the intent of most virtualization platforms is the same, the devil is often in the details of features/functions. The biggest impact: the people currently tapped to build and maintain the virtualization platform will most likely need to be completely retrained.
Looking ahead to 2025
At this year's VMworld Explore, Hock Tan presented his vision as part of his keynote , which announced a re-focus around VMware's strategy going forward.
The TL;DR: VMware will be largely abandoning anything around public cloud and going all-in and consolidating its efforts around it's "bread and butter" - on-premise private clouds .
If you are acquiring another company, you want to leverage their strengths and Hock Tan is definitely "going for it" to boost his shareholders' bottom line. Can't blame him for it, given the history of VMware .
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The good news: Evaluating VMware alternatives has re-energized the approach for more modern, open-source solutions. Similar to other IT domains (like network and storage), this re-architecting can also be a forcing function for the modernization that the organization needed anyway from a technical and people perspective. Platform and DevOps Engineers will be at the center of this transformation - as they will be the ones that can bridge the gap from old-school to new-school, since they have the skills and knowledge to architect, build, deliver, and maintain these complex systems.
More good news: Many VMware administrators are seeing the writing on the walls as well . Many are already taking it upon themselves to re-skill and re-train on new virtualization and IT platforms focused on open-source themselves: Kubernetes, Infrastructure as Code, and Automation are the hottest topics. Finally, if you happen to already be automating your VMware virtual machines with a standardized tool such as Ansible, this migration might be less effort than you think.
New players entering the game
With research indicating that more than half of VMware customers are looking to move off VMware there is no better time to look at the suite of enterprise products based on open-source projects to help you get where you need to be. Whether you are a buyer or a user, there are some big players out there vying for your wallet. Folks like Microsoft, Nutanix, have been mainstays in the virtualization space, but there's also room for free-tier/homelabs such as Proxmox. Another big player is Red Hat, which has an entire enterprise virtualization platform in Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization along with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to help migrate and operate an entire virtual machine estate in a more modernized, open-source way.
In-Depth Demos
Colophon: "Hot since 2012"
Ok so I went back into my LinkedIn history and remembered that I had taken (and passed!) a certification on Red Hat Virtualization (RHV) over 12 years ago: