VMware virtualisation alternatives and the storage they need

What are the alternatives to VMware?

The core choice is whether to stay with VMware while mitigating cost increases by seeking efficiencies elsewhere, or migrating some – or all – VM workloads off VMware. 

Alternatives to VMware include moving to a different hypervisor, running VM workloads in Kubernetes, or migrating VMware workloads to the cloud. 

VMware alternatives include competing virtualisation technologies, such as Nutanix, Microsoft Hyper-V and Oracle Linux Virtualization. There are also open source options that include Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, Linux Kernel-level Virtual Machines (KVM) and Proxmox Virtual Environment.

Containerisation is also a strong alternative to server virtualisation. 

Storage has been a challenge with containers historically, as they were originally conceived as stateless. However, today there are some very mature storage and data protection offerings for containerised workloads.

Also, products such as KubeVirt provide open-source tools and an environment where developers can build apps in containers and virtual machines in parallel.

What are the pros and cons of migrating from VMware?

With all the options available, there are many potential benefits to switching. These mostly centre on lower licensing costs on alternative hypervisor platforms, but serious consideration must be given to a few key areas. 

These include managing your organisation’s skills in the transition to a new environment, how to integrate existing dependencies – such as backup, storage and networking – with a new virtualisation layer, whether existing hardware can cope with the target virtualisation environment, and the cost of the migration itself.

VMware is also available in all three hyperscaler clouds, but here costs are likely to be even higher and come with the kind of restrictions that result from, for example, egress costs. The cloud as a location for virtualisation is most likely best reserved for test and development, and burst workloads from on-site VMware deployments.

Regardless of the route decided upon, organisations will need to consider the management overhead, storage, data protection and cost of any alternatives to VMware before making a decision. 

What storage do you need for virtualisation?

Whether you stay with VMware or switch to another platform, your storage must match up to avoid performance issues. Virtual machine workload performance needs can vary, from intensive and highly-random artificial intelligence (AI) and transactional workloads with lots of reads and writes, to those that are more read-heavy and sequential. Virtualised environments demand storage that can handle high volumes of random I/O, with many virtual machines running on each compute node.

Flash storage is essential for most virtualised setups because it’s well-suited to these input/output (I/O) demands. Here, the ability to scale compute and storage capacity independently as data volumes grow is useful. Being able to add capacity as needed without being forced to buy more controllers allows right-sizing to the volume of data cost-effectively.

Since VM workloads range from heavy, random I/O (like AI and transactions) to more read-heavy, sequential tasks, all-flash storage is the best fit due to its increased performance, density and reliability compared with other options.

Ideally, choose a supplier that offers options from ultra-high performance to cost-effective, high-density services such as QLC flash.

Key choices summed up

Businesses that want an alternative to VMware can migrate to a different hypervisor or embrace containerisation.

Whichever path they choose, there are serious benefits, but it’s not a move to be taken lightly, because the new environment must fit with existing dependencies in backup, storage and other key areas of infrastructure.