Scads of virtualization vendors will try to compete this year for the contract-signing hand of enterprises that might feel jilted by Broadcom’s handling of VMware.
Vendors looking to take on the entire virtualization stack or specific pieces of it, as well as many existing open source projects, see this as a pivotal opportunity to gain a foothold in customer data centers.
Many of these customers might still need to wrap an existing contract with VMware or Broadcom over the next several years, but Bruce Kornfeld, chief marketing and product officer at StorMagic, said he thinks IT admins will put themselves out on the market for alternatives in 2025.
StorMagic was one of several vendors last year to introduce a virtualization offering alongside new market entrants from Hewlett Packard Enterprises (HPE) as well as smaller, established players such as VergeIO.
“It’s been a little more than a year since Broadcom threw the hand grenade into the market,” Kornfeld said. “The larger customers we sell and prospect to, they can’t get off VMware quickly. [But] I believe 2025 is the year a lot of them will be pulling the trigger.”
Open source projects such as OpenStack, Proxmox or OpenNebula are also maturing into viable enterprise options, according to Marc Staimer, founder and president of Dragon Slayer Consulting.
The marketing frenzy might capture the attention of customers, but timelines for deciding on a virtualization technology change and adoption will still take many years, according to Staimer and other industry analysts.
“[Vendors] are correct that people aren’t going to move right away,” Staimer said. “It’s just going to take some time.”
On the market
Open source projects are a cost-effective alternative to commercial hypervisors if IT admins understand what services the business stack requires, according to Naveen Chhabra, a principal analyst at Forrester Research.
Proxmox can handle virtualization needs, while OpenStack is more aligned with private cloud-like offerings of VMware or Nutanix, providing components for networking, storage and other stack services, he said.
SMBs or smaller enterprises can likely make do with open source or smaller offerings and find the needed support services as a fallback should issues arise, he said. Enterprises might need more granular controls or more expansive software ecosystem connections without manually creating that connectivity.
“If you’re looking at a small mom-and-pop shop that needs virtualization, Proxmox is good,” Chhabra said. “But if you have 5,000 people and you need to put policies and guardrails in place, you need more enterprise-class solutions.”
Nutanix might dominate much of the VMware competition discussion, primarily due to marketing, but other IT vendors are attempting to carve out some portion of the virtualization market, Chhabra said.
HPE released HPE VM Essentials in December, providing a Linux kernel-based VM hypervisor alternative that can either integrate with the larger HPE GreenLake cloud platform or work as a standalone virtualization platform. It was built on technology from Morpheus Data, which HPE acquired last August.
VMware is still a “first-class” partner by HPE, with combination offerings of server hardware and the VMware Cloud Foundation, according to Bryan Thompson, vice president of cloud product management for HPE GreenLake.
HPE VM Essentials aims to provide customers that might be considering a transition to cloud or experimenting with new ways to run workloads. Customers increased their demand for an alternative virtualization offering but saw HPE’s catalog of services as a benefit compared with standalone or open source offerings, he said.
“More and more customers are eager to pursue and leverage an alternative, maybe even without a full ecosystem already in place,” Thompson said. “The market is driving pressure as well as their appetite to come to the table. … They’re not going to wait for the ecosystem to catch up or for commercial, off-the-shelf software to be fully certified.”
HPE might be responding to market demands, but the vendor has remained quiet in its marketing of the service likely to maintain an amicable relationship with Broadcom, Chhabra said. That approach could lead HPE to be overlooked as a VMware alternative but sustain a hardware partnership with Broadcom should VMware remain the platform of choice for customers.
“They realize at the end of the day they’re going to get [a small] percentage compared to the [majority of customers] staying on VMware,” Chhabra said.
Opting for a new vendor will also require enterprises to align goals with vendor strategies and services, Naveen said, such as the open source focus of Proxmox, the HCI of VergeIO or the full-stack replacement of Nutanix.
“There are philosophical decision points that these vendors and ecosystems have,” he said.
The partner you know
Most enterprise customers are choosing to stay with VMware by Broadcom despite public protestations said Roy Illsley, chief analyst of IT operations at Informa TechTarget’s Omdia.
Although a handful of virtualization and cloud vendors might tout winning over customers, Illsley said he expects VMware’s largest customers will remain for stability, breadth of support and deep connections to their applications.
“I haven’t seen much actual movement from VMware, but I have seen a lot of noise,” Illsley said. “What people have decided is they’ve looked at the market, and they’ve decided VMware is most mature and most stable.”
Those customers aren’t forever, Illsley said. As the rise of cloud computing and container technologies such as Kubernetes would be more popular platforms for new businesses and applications, it resulted in a gradual drift away from VMware, he added.
“It’s going to be a very slow burn off of virtualization over the next five to 10 years,” Illsley said. “What we’re going to see is a mix of models. It’s a very complex arrangement of [computing] bits, and I don’t see anyone saying, ‘Let’s clear the table here.'”
This year is pivotal for Broadcom to keep customers around and buyers to understand what they’ll need before staying or departing for other technologies, he said.
“VMware competitors have never had this much opportunity with customers, and customers have never felt this in demand with this many companies,” Illsley said. “There’s a little bit of a situation where some [customers] will move because they’ll be persuaded, others will procrastinate for too long, and others will head off down a different route.”
Tim McCarthy is a news writer for Informa TechTarget covering cloud and data storage.
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