IT のレジリエンス : 2 つの異なるハイパーバイザーの実行

プラン B を持つことは、どの IT チームにとっても重要です。 IT プロフェッショナルは、嵐の襲来を待つのではなく、選択肢を検討し、ビジネスの継続性を確保する戦略を構築する必要があります。それは時に、冗長性を取り入れたり、将来のオペレーションの基盤となりうる新しいツールをテストしたりすることを意味します。

2023 年後半に Broadcom が VMware を買収した後、多くのお客様や パートナーが戦略や進むべき道の見直しを余儀なくされました。 VMware のライセンスの残存期間を当てにして、迫り来る変更を遅らせようとした顧客もいれば、代替案を探した顧客もいました。中には、選択肢を比較するために複数の選択肢を検討し始めたところもありました。

Forrester 社は、「大幅な値上げ、サポートの低下、強制的なサブスクリプションによって疲弊した」として、2024 年には VMware の顧客の 20% が離れるだろうと予測しています。

Nutanix のプロダクト・マーケティング・ディレクターである Steve Carter 氏によると、Broadcom が VMware を買収してからの変化により、多くの IT チームが VMware の代替製品を試す良い機会であるかどうかを検討するようになったといいます。

「特に AI やクラウドネイティブ・イノベーションの需要が高まるにつれて、インフラストラクチャの管理方法を見直す人が多くなっています」と Carter 氏は言います。

Broadcom が VMware を買収する以前から、Carter 氏は 2 つの異なるハイパーバイザーを使用している企業をいくつか見てきました。

A few years ago, the CIO of Boyd Gaming Corp., operator of 28 hotel and casino properties across the US states, was negotiating a fresh enterprise agreement with VMware prior to its acquisition by Broadcom, reported The Register. 

Inside Boyd’s IT infrastructure there were two different hypervisors, including Nutanix AHV. Since the Nutanix hypervisor was free, Lowe thought he didn’t need to pay for the other, reported The Register. 

The company keenly compared VMware and Nutanix.

“Boyd was using VMware as our hypervisor and Nutanix’s AHV,” said Greg Lowe in an interview during the 2024 .NEXT conference.

”I'll call it a bake-off: May the best person win. We put our requirements out there and we let things go head to head.”

Lowe emphasized that Boyd Gaming couldn't afford disruptions in the business.

“We needed to plan out this migration,” he said. “It took about 18 months. It's not something you just flip off a switch and you're done. You need to plan. You need to focus to do the cutover. I do recognize some companies are probably easier than ours to go ahead and do the migration. But again, I still think it takes that commitment, that effort, and that reliance on each other to say this is what we're doing.”

While Boyd Gaming moved away from VMware to Nutanix, others have good reasons for running two different hypervisors, explained Carter. He pointed to resiliency to handle threats and the ability to grow.

“Organizations can maintain high-risk parts of their legacy VMware infrastructure while exploring how an alternative hypervisor can run business critical applications and build new capabilities,” he said.

When vendor shakeups occur, CIOs and IT leaders immediately think about resiliency. Vendor allegiance – once critical for many organizations due both to convenience and loyalty – has become a company liability for many. 

The sheer amount of options now available on the market, coupled with today’s demand for more flexibility and hyper-customized user experiences, requires IT leaders to think more innovatively.

Reveal the Best of Both Worlds

Carter said that many VMware customers have been investing in their solutions for decades. At the same time, they want to embrace modernization and deploy applications and workloads suited for greater agility, scalability, and cloud-native environments. The disruption brought by the VMware acquisition has driven many to reassess how they virtualizate their infrastructure and to consider different options.

“By running two hypervisors, companies can build a hybrid infrastructure that maintains legacy systems and learn what’s the best way to handle new demands,” Carter said.

Carter explained that right now, a common scenario in which companies are running two hypervisors include some sort of past acquisition or merger, where there are legacy systems between the two environments. In other words: It’s not being implemented intentionally at these enterprises. Yet it can provide a head start in the current environment. 

Carter emphasized that the search for alternatives and the process of migrating to a new hypervisor requires time to plan, execute and ensure the new systems are running accurately. He said vendor support with the migration strategy can help ease the process and build confidence within the IT team. 

The benefits of adopting a strategy of running two different hypervisors can be quite powerful when considered from the perspectives of companies looking for more resilience, or those who just want to modernize in a way that can retain legacy systems that still deliver value.

“The aim is to manage present needs and be able to enlist new capabilities to meet future demands,” Carter said. 

It’s the on-going challenge of integrating legacy systems and applications with next-gen technologies and solutions.

A dual-hypervisor approach enables organizations to maintain status-quo in their existing IT environments while taking on new technologies and learning what works best. 

Carter said this is particularly relevant as businesses embrace and evolve their hybrid multicloud operations. Going forward, they want to manage resources and workloads across a variety of on-premises and public cloud services.

Rene Van Den Bedem, principal technical program manager at Microsoft’s Azure, is seeing the benefits clients are experiencing by running VMware and Nutanix together on Azure public cloud.

“The main requirement is having an Azure landing zone, and then you can build whatever service that you want on it,” he told The Forecast. 

“I think we're going to see more of that. Typically, customers do like to have one hypervisor of choice, but that's a legacy on-prem way of thinking. I think the world is changing.”

Editor’s note: Learn about AHV and the Nutanix Cloud Platform. Explore the steps for migrating to Nutanix from VMware and the VMware to Nutanix Promotion (view full offer details at nutanix.com/migrationoffer). Also read 6 Simple Steps to Fast VMC-on-AWS Migrations.

Ken Kaplan is Editor in Chief for The Forecast by Nutanix. Find him on X @kenekaplan.

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