Broadcom’s complete post-acquisition revamp of VMware has been laid bare, with new branding, market focus, pricing and partnerships. But what should enterprises most impacted by these changes do next?

Matt Watts, chief technology evangelist at NetApp, stressed that the first move is for those enterprise and IT teams to take a beat before making any significant decisions.

“I think the reality that we're hearing is that most people are seeing a bit of a shock in terms of how much their costs are likely to rise, and when we first started talking about this going back a couple of months ago it's very easy for people to get very emotional and I understand the rationale behind that,” Watts told SDxCentral in an interview. “But emotionally driven decisions are quite often not the best decisions that we can make.”

Once that is taken into account, Watts pointed to four things enterprises can do as they tackle what’s next.

The first is that for companies so deeply embedded with VMware that it would be too disruptive to completely turn away is for them to gain a clear picture of their VMware environment, with a particular focus on “wastage.” Watts noted this is a somewhat ironic exercise as VMware was initially established and gained a strong enterprise foothold due to its focus on reducing data center waste and increase utilization.

“And it did that very, very successfully,” Watts said. “But over time, what we started to see is that a lot of companies are spinning up virtual machines to serve a purpose but aren't cleaned up afterwards. There are all kinds of orphaned environments. There's a lot of virtual machines that are consuming more resources or accessing more resources than they need. We're looking at it and saying, ‘if you're looking to stay on VMware, whatever the reason is that's pushing you into that decision, let's at least look at or take stock of exactly what you have today and see whether there might be opportunities to reduce costs.’”

Tangentially, Watts said this also includes data storage needs and usage. He noted that most data stored by an enterprise is never used, which leaves an opportunity to reduce ongoing storage costs.

An open hypervisor strategy

Organizations also need to look at their hypervisor strategy, which Watts noted should be an easier move due to a large number of choices. He pointed to options like Hyper V, which “is sort of back on the technology roadmap for people,” the Linux kernel-based virtual machine (KVM), Proxmox and Oracle, but overall with the notion that the next choice in hypervisor is something that allows for greater flexibility down the road.

“VMware became the predominant hypervisor,” Watts said. “And then what people did was not just locked themselves into VMware, they then started to look at VXrail type technology as an HCI platform. So now not only are you locked into the hypervisor you've been using – VMware in this case – you’ve now actually allowed the hypervisor to make an architectural decision that locks you into the physical architecture, the underlying platforms that you're running as well.”

This recommendation was echoed by Bruce Kornfeld, chief marketing and product officer at StorMagic, who recently told SDxCentral that many organizations he has been working with were looking at open-source hypervisors like KVM.

“No one’s jumping today and saying, ‘I’m done with VMware, I’m going KVM,’ but there’s definite interest,” Kornfeld said. “We’re doing presentations. We’re doing demos. We’re showing customers that this is an alternative and it works just fine. They have to make the decision of can they handle it with their own people and their resources?”

Move to the cloud

Watt’s next piece of advice is for organizations to start looking at what they might be able to transfer from their VMware-managed on-premises environments to the cloud, though the cost effectiveness of this will be dependent on workloads.

“I think people should explore whether running VMware in Amazon, Microsoft or Google may actually be a way of offsetting some of the cost increases they’re seeing for their on-premises environment,” Watt said, adding this could be especially relevant for disaster recovery applications. “Disaster recovery is a pretty high-cost solution if you're using the VMware site recovery tools.”

Broadcom has recently struck deals with the large hyperscalers to ease the transition of data from on-premises VMware environments to those VMware environments in the public cloud. The first was with Google Cloud Platform (GCP), with Broadcom CEO Hock Tan stating “we expect other partner and hyperscaler clouds to follow with similar support.”

Maybe HCI is not the answer

A final point of decision making should be around an organization’s future hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) plans. HCI combines compute, network and storage functions in a software-defined package that offers smaller, more flexible building blocks for increased customization.

This type of architecture has been a boon for organizations looking for support of consolidated virtual environments for different workloads, but new smaller application types that rely on advanced analytics and artificial intelligence may highlight potential inflexibility in HCI platforms.

“I’m not saying HCI is dead,” Watts stated. “But, it makes me wonder whether what we had in the background with all of this, which was converged infrastructure, which has more freedom to scale up performance, scale up capacity, gives you that ability to scale those pieces independently, it suddenly starts to make those types of architectures to underpin workloads that might be using other virtualization providers, but also the more modern workloads that companies are looking for the future as well.”

This last point feeds into what Broadcom’s recent changes to VMware mean for organizations.

“This is an opportunity,” Watts concluded. “It's not a nice way to force an opportunity through disruption, but I think that once we get past the emotions, once we start to work out, OK, how are we going to address life with VMware, life after VMware, I think it could open up opportunities that will improve the potential that business and IT has but maybe it just needed that push. I always think that something like this, you have to deal with it, but hopefully people see this as an opportunity. It's going to be uncomfortable, it's going to be disruptive, but I think there is an opportunity for a path past this.”