Many datacentres rely on virtualisation, and VMware was a leading platform until new owner Broadcom changed its licensing rules. The move has left many organisations reassessing their infrastructure.

Gartner vice-president and analyst Michael Warrilow, speaking at a recent Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations and Cloud Strategies Conference in Sydney, said the analyst firm’s survey data indicates that two out of three organisations are already negative about Broadcom, and that businesses must now assess the practicality of moving their workloads to other platforms.

“I’ve talked to probably 700 Gartner clients over the past three years about their situation,” Warrilow said. “Most of them are asking, ‘What are others doing?’, and what I say is, ‘They’re asking what you’re doing’.”

A virtualisation strategy is essential and needed soon, he said. “vSphere 8 reaches end of general support in October 2027, and you don’t want to upgrade to version 9 just because you haven’t decided what to do by then.”

With no single drop-in replacement for VMware, Warrilow predicted: “I guarantee you that for almost everyone in this room, you’re going to become more multi-hypervisor.”

He added that about 70% of his clients are unwilling to look at hyperconverged infrastructure, often due to existing three-tier storage architectures with external storage arrays.

Networking is also a critical issue. “I’ve talked to clients still rolling out NSX, even though they want to get off it, because they’re halfway through the project. It’s probably the stickiest part of the [VMware] stack,” Warrilow warned.

Gartner estimates migrating from a medium or large VMware environment will take 1.5 to four years. This lengthy process demands planning, including ensuring any proposed replacement can deliver the necessary performance, including compute and memory, for existing mission-critical applications.

Warrilow advised against seeking easy wins by migrating less-important applications first, as these may not use features like high availability, which are essential for mission-critical workloads. Moreover, while such moves might reduce VMware usage, organisations could face higher effective costs at renewal. “If you reduce your workloads by half, will [Broadcom] just stop discounting by half?”

Simply swapping hypervisors is insufficient, Warrilow warned. Even a like-for-like swap can take years, and “at best, no one notices what you’ve done, and that’s not really adding a lot of value to the organisation”. He added that such projects often encounter issues, potentially resulting in higher costs for the same outcome.

Key considerations extend to availability, backup and disaster recovery, alongside systems management. “How are we going to replace vCenter?” Warrilow asked rhetorically.

While going “all-in” on Kubernetes might be a viable long-term strategy for some, questions remain about virtual appliances. Furthermore, the ability to integrate observability and monitoring is often more limited with VMware alternatives, he said, adding: “I almost guarantee you’re going to be multi-hypervisor, and that means you need a more heterogeneous management layer.”

The path forward depends on specific requirements. “If fast, low-latency, reliable networking is important or there are compliance issues, you’ll probably need to stay on-premise,” Warrilow said. Options then include sticking with VMware and accepting the cost, migrating to a different virtualisation product, or containerising applications.

Organisations prepared to modernise applications can run them in containers, either on-premise or off-premise. For those with a cloud-first strategy, virtualised applications can be moved to cloud-hosted virtualisation products or lift-and-shifted to infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS).

In the context of modernisation and containerisation, Warrilow sees long-term price predictability, such as Microsoft’s five-year reserved instances, as an important factor. “But who’s the cheapest vendor alternative to VMware today? You wouldn’t believe it. Oracle, right? They actually have a really cost-effective solution,” he said. “But I can’t get anyone to entertain the idea of Oracle.

“There is not going to be a one-on-one replacement for VMware anytime soon. The most proven path off VMware is lift-and-shift to cloud,” he added, although he acknowledged this may be unacceptable to some organisations.