Navigating VMware by Broadcom with Data Infrastructure Insights

The acquisition of VMware by Broadcom in 2023 has significantly disrupted the status quo, prompting many customers to reevaluate their investment in VMware and to explore alternatives. VMware has led the market for enterprise workloads for the better part of the past 2 decades, and the ultimate impact that Broadcom will have on the future of VMware is yet to be seen. Although alternatives certainly exist, there is no direct replacement for VMware vSphere, and any effort to replicate all of its capabilities will unquestionably be fraught with challenges.

VMware Workstation debuted in 1999, laying the groundwork for VMware’s flagship products, ESX and vCenter, which quickly became the industry’s leading virtualization platform. The company’s strategic partnerships, continual innovation, and robust ecosystem further solidified its leadership position in the market, making VMware synonymous with virtualization.

VMware acquired many companies over the years. Some were strategic, to enhance VMware’s offerings at the time, such as Pivotal (which became Tanzu), Arkin (which became Aria Operations for Networks), and CloudHealth (which powered Aria Cost). Many others, such as Workspace ONE, Carbon Black, and VeloCloud, were acquired to diversify VMware’s portfolio. Some were more successful than others, but in general these acquisitions have enabled VMware to provide a more comprehensive suite of solutions and to have more conversations with customers beyond vSphere.

Despite the efforts at diversification, the core of VMware’s offerings has always been virtualization. The value for the money that vSphere provides is indisputable. With no real competition in the market and nearly 2 decades of uninterrupted VMware dominance, a vast community of VMware professionals has grown, further cementing vSphere as a fixture of the modern data center.

After Dell divested itself of VMware, it was just a matter of time before another tech juggernaut would step up to take their turn. VMware has fallen under the umbrella of a larger company since being acquired by EMC in the early 2000s, but in reality, VMware has operated mostly autonomously. The stewardship of EMC and then Dell principally served to align go-to-market strategies, joint business ventures (VCE), and broker-favorable OEM arrangements.

Broadcom has taken a more direct hand than previous ownership by leaning and focusing on the portfolio, driving efficiency into the business, and simplifying the purchasing process, but also made significant changes to bundles and pricing.

VMware has always focused on aligning customers with their vision for the data center. The full VMware Cloud Foundation stack represents the realization of that vision, but historically it has been a difficult sell for many customers, due in part to the high cost. Another factor has been the extreme value of vSphere Enterprise Plus, which is all that most customers need, and it’s a small fraction of the price of the full platform.

Large customers who were previously heavily invested in multiple higher-tier products, such as the full Aria Suite and NSX, are likely to realize great value from the bundle pricing and simplified licensing. With the re-introduction of VSphere Enterprise Plus licensing smaller customers are not left behind, but without a-la-carte licensing it is all or nothing for some advanced features which may create some challenges.

NetApp has discussed this subject with many customers over the past year. We have developed a deep understanding of this journey and what it will require to survive and even to thrive during what may be the greatest market disruption of the past decade.

For most, the first step on this journey will be to survive the next VMware renewal. Gone are the days of cheap and plentiful on-prem vSphere licensing, so most customers who want to maintain a VMware footprint will need to align their on-prem vSphere investment with more cloudlike economics. Even those customers who are planning to migrate off VMware altogether will need a fair bit of runway to do it. They will also need the tools and the insights to manage the transition of their infrastructure to a new platform.

What comes next varies from customer to customer, but the fact remains that there is no direct replacement for VMware on the market today. No matter which direction you choose, there will not be feature parity with what you had before, and you will need a combination of products and services. New platforms require retooling and retraining, new runbooks, new workflows, new disaster recovery strategies, new SLAs, and new observability. The care and feeding of your IT infrastructure in a post-VMware world will look completely different from what you have been accustomed to.

NetApp^® Data Infrastructure Insights (DII) provides a comprehensive approach to managing these challenges. It offers tools and features that streamline your operations, enhance your system’s performance, and help you reduce costs. Let’s look at a few of the DII features and benefits.

• AI-driven observability, analytics, and troubleshooting

DII delivers deep visibility into your hybrid multicloud estate, enabling you to monitor performance, to optimize resources, and to troubleshoot issues proactively. With real-time analytics, customizable dashboards, and automated reporting, your IT team can gain insights into usage patterns, identify bottlenecks, and confirm that resource allocation aligns with your business priorities. DII understands your entire environment and can correlate logs, alerts, metrics, and even configuration changes to related objects in the data path to quickly identify issues.

• Seamless integration

DII is designed for seamless integration with VMware and other virtualization platforms. You can establish a unified, heterogeneous observability plane to take advantage of your existing VMware investments while being prepared for whatever comes next.

It’s likely to take years to transition to another virtualization solution, and during that period, your ITOps team must manage both environments concurrently. The use of only vendor-specific tools without a common operational picture introduces a great deal of complexity and risk into what is already a challenging evolution. By contrast, the unified DII observability plane simplifies management, reduces risk, and optimizes your operations.

• Cost efficiency

DII has always helped reduce costs by enabling efficient storage utilization, capacity management, and reporting. In addition, out of the box, DII now helps you identify opportunities to rightsize your VMware estate, reducing the pain of that post-Broadcom Enterprise License Agreement (ELA) renewal. DII gives you intelligent recommendations through an advanced algorithm that eliminates the guesswork, provides a clear path forward to cost savings, and helps with host repurposing.

In the wake of the Broadcom acquisition, VMware customers are navigating a complex landscape of integration, performance optimization, and cost management. NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights offers a powerful suite of tools to overcome these challenges, providing enhanced visibility, seamless integration, cost efficiency, and robust security. By using these capabilities, you can survive and even thrive during the Broadcom disruption and be prepared for whatever other unforeseen challenges the future brings.

Start optimizing your VMware environment today for the inevitable changes to come. Find out more about NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights and request a demonstration to see it in action.