VMware cloud environments powered by virtual storage area network (vSAN) are about to get cheaper, after the Broadcom subsidiary adjusted hardware requirements in a testing rethink.

The virtual machine (VM) giant is also losing its stranglehold on an increasingly fragmentary VM market, Gartner research has revealed.

In a buck against the trend of rising prices in memory and more, VMware lowered the hardware configurations – or ReadyNodes – for both vSAN storage clusters and vSAN hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) clusters, while simplifying sizing down to three ReadyNodes per each of the two cluster types.

Specifically, the price drops mean a 67% decrease in RAM for ReadyNodes certified for vSAN storage clusters, a 33% decrease in CPU cores for those certified for vSAN storage clusters, and a 50% decrease in RAM for hardware certified for vSAN HCI clusters.

The reductions come not from charity following recent Broadcom hardships, but due to VMware eschewing synthetic testing for a telemetry-guided approach, revealing vSAN clusters use “much less” RAM than previously thought, and the same for vSAN clusters needing less CPU resources.

“Synthetic tests do not reflect the characteristics of real-world workloads and the behavior of the storage system. There was an opportunity to refine our hardware guidance through … telemetry data gathered from thousands of vSAN clusters running all types of production workloads,” explained Pete Koehler, product marketing engineer in Broadcom’s VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) division.

Koeheler also flagged more “discrete cost savings” through savings multiplied based on the number of hosts, with fewer hosts needed to achieve ReadyNode requirements, as well as cheaper VCF licensing and a reduced need for power, cooling, and rack space.

VMware’s announcement did not comment on the potential mea culpa that its previous period of synthetic testing may have led to unnecessarily inflated prices, instead concentrating on the new boon to VCF users.

That boon may help Broadcom’s drive for VMware users to jump ship to VCF, a contentious venture that has seen legacy users report migration issues and price increases in the wake of VMware’s acquisition, as well as a “red warning” against Broadcom from the Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe (CISPE).

In its new Market Guide for Server Virtualization Platforms, Gartner commented that such forces are driving a fragmentation of the VM market, with the server virtualization market “facing the most significant disruption in decades,” according to researchers.

In moving away from VMware, Gartner noted enterprises will have no choice but to bifurcate their stacks based on workload and invest in multi-hypervisor management platforms to avoid what it called virtual management sprawl.

Otherwise, it warned infrastructure and operation teams will “become increasingly siloed — something that was prevalent before VMware became a cornerstone of most enterprise IT infrastructure,” wrote the researchers.

Gartner noted rising client interest in tooling that is separate from any particular vendor, and which is able to support multiple vendors and technologies, noting solutions such as Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Microsoft’s System Center Virtual Machine Manager, and, returning back to Broadcom, VCF.

The research warned though that despite the increase in VM offerings as of late, there still is “no parity replacement for VMware”, with many alternatives either incomplete, maturing, or both.