Organisations that decide to reduce their VMware footprints, or quit entirely, will emerge with more complex and less capable infrastructure.

That’s the view of Paul Delory, a research vice president with analyst firm Gartner, who told the company’s IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference in Sydney that there is no technical reason for VMware users to adopt a rival hypervisor, and that no vendor offers a one-for-one replacement for the virtualisation pioneer’s flagship Cloud Foundation (VCF) suite.

But Delory said Broadcom’s licensing policies, which see it only sell VCF, mean VMware users’ licensing bills typically rise by 300 to 400 percent. Broadcom argues that the full-stack private clouds VCF makes it possible to build are so efficient that VCF quickly pays for itself.

The analyst told the conference he thinks those contemplating a move off VMware will do better if they instead focus on application modernisation. But he said Broadcom’s price changes, and the prospect the company might hike prices again in future, mean many VMware users will look elsewhere.

Those who do, he warned, will end up with more complex infrastructure for two reasons.

One is that few organisations will be able to quit VMware entirely, as they run applications with dependencies that aren’t easy or economical to unwind. Reducing or eliminating a VMware rig therefore means adopting multiple replacements, which creates more infrastructure to manage and therefore extra complexity.

The other is that no rival hypervisor can match the efficiency or VM density possible when using VMware’s products, so moving means acquiring more hardware.

Delory said the best alternatives to VMware are the public cloud, or HCI vendors – these days that acronym denotes both hyperconverged infrastructure and hybrid cloud infrastructure.

The analyst warned that HCI vendors, with the exception of Nutanix, have weak migration tools that will leave users needing to create bespoke migration automations using “Ansible and a Rube Goldberg machine.”

Public clouds, he said, will welcome customers who move 1,000 or more VMs with free migration services.

He recommended against considering OpenStack, which he said remains “too big, too complex, and has too many moving parts for the typical IT shop to handle effectively.”

Delory also warned VMware users that migration projects are significant engineering undertakings that require extensive assessment of every application in a fleet to determine its best destination, and the work required to get it there.

He reminded VMware users that not every workload is certified to run under non-VMware hypervisors, and that some vendors now offer cloud-native versions of their wares and therefore offer an easier on-ramp to containerised applications.

Delory advised exploring those options, and not making architectural decisions that mean you can’t consider moving off VMware.

“VMware is betting that you can’t move off and they can jack the price way up,” he said. “That may be a good bet. But don’t make it easy.”

The analyst finished his talk by predicting most users will minimise their VMware footprints, rather than eliminating them, and restated Gartner’s prediction that 35 percent of workloads currently running under VMware will operate on a different platform by 2028.