Having a Plan B is table stakes for any IT team. Rather than wait for a storm to hit, IT professionals map out options and build strategies that will ensure business continuity. Sometimes that means embracing redundancies or testing new tools that could become the underpinning of future operations.
After Broadcom acquired VMware in late 2023, it unleashed a plethora of changes that forced many customers and partners to reassess strategies and their path forward. Some held on – perhaps relying on the remaining term of their VMware licenses to delay the looming changes – while others looked for alternatives. Some even began running redundancies to compare options.
Forrester predicted 20% of VMware customers would leave in 2024, “exhausted by significant price hikes, degrading support, and mandatory subscription.”
Changes since Broadcom acquired VMware are driving many IT teams to consider if this is a good time to try a VMware alternative, according to Steve Carter, product marketing director at Nutanix.
“Many are reframing how to manage infrastructure, especially as demand for AI and cloud native innovation escalates,” Carter said.
Even before Broadcom made a bid to buy VMware, Carter saw some enterprises using two different hypervisors.
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 Gregg 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 virtualize 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.”
