back to article VMware migrations will be long, expensive, risky, Gartner warns

If the changes Broadcom brought to VMware have you thinking of a move to an alternative virtualization platform, expect a long, costly, and risky project – and perhaps a longer, costlier, and riskier one if you put off pondering the move. That’s the thrust of a new assessment titled “Estimating a Large-Scale VMware Migration” …

  1. Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck

    You seriously overestimate how much work a VM manager does and how hard it is to switch them out.

    VMware is bleeding like a stuck pig, and the bleeding is only going to get worse as more and more customers cry "screw this happy horseshit" and find something a lot cheaper.

    Question is: how much did Broadcom pay Gartner to publish this "the sky is falling" article?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      They're probably too smart to do it directly.

      A better question is how much does Broadcom and VMware pay Gartner for all their other "research" and "analysis" offerings?

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      You clearly don't use NSX.

      1. Oneman2Many Bronze badge

        "You clearly don't use NSX."

        I feel sorry for you.

      2. Ken G Silver badge
        Happy

        I can't afford one but it's my favourite Honda.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      I assume you don't work in an enterprise then ?

    4. Throatwarbler Mangrove Silver badge
      Meh

      "You seriously overestimate how much work a VM manager does and how hard it is to switch them out."

      That depends on how deeply entwined the customer is with the VMware stack. If you're just using the generic hypervisor, then sure, a migration is simple. If you're using other functionality like VVOLs, NSX, etc., or if you have significant automation developed around PowerCLI, or if you have a business application which is only certified on the VMware stack, then migration becomes more difficult. Questions may also arise on the topics of performance and technical support; many people, for example, are looking at Proxmox, but Proxmox technical support is only available during business hours in the Eastern European timezone, which is hardly ideal for a great many customers. In short, the situation may be more complicated than just migrating VMs to a new hypervisor and calling it a day.

      That said, Broadcom customers now have a massive economic incentive to find an alternative vendor, which means that market disruption is all but inevitable. The big winners so far appear to be public cloud vendors since, for many businesses, public cloud is the path of least resistance. Microsoft have, of course, managed to step on their own dicks in the hypervisor business; despite having a huge amount of time to develop Hyper-V, Microsoft has largely failed to make it an appealing platform, insofar as it is surprisingly difficult to implement correctly and remains less capable than VMware. Citrix, who you'd think would be a reasonable competitor, somehow seems unable to capitalize on this opportunity, possibly due to having acquired a reputation for poor security and their own Byzantine licensing scheme. Reading the tea leaves, it seems like Nutanix and Proxmox are best positioned to scoop up on-prem customers, but that situation is clearly very fluid.

  2. Roland6 Silver badge

    Looks like Gartner have published the beginnings of a migration plan, similar in some respects to the various mainframe migration plans that appeared in the mid 1990s.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      So, faster and cheaper to start fresh then burn the old platform to the ground?

  3. Philip Storry
    Facepalm

    WTF?

    "but that Oracle’s prices may be even better for its server virtualization offering."

    How to lose all credibility in one simple statement.

    (I suppose, to be charitable, he didn't say who they'd be better for...)

  4. harrys Bronze badge

    semi true....

    For the top customers with tens of thousands of vm's in disparate location, true

    for the others, def not!

    how big are these other, 50%, 70%, 90%?

    who knows, only the broadcom execs have access to the spreadsheet, their jobs depend on getting this right so that they can keep the shareholders happy and get their bonus's

  5. Guy de Loimbard Silver badge
    Facepalm

    So it would appear a Gartner analyst

    May have some line into his bank account from Broadcom..... of course this wouldn't be true would it? A paid for piece of advertising dressed up as analysis of the horrors of VMWare migration time and cost?

    That said, this is not the latest piece of irrelevance to come out of Gartner, the last one I saw was some nonsense about corporations being "desperate to have AI PCs", which was also a one man band opinion.

    There was once upon a time, a perception that Gartner were relevant in whatever space you operate in, but some of these missives coming out from Gartner at the moment just scream of jumping on the relevance bandwagon!

    1. Roland6 Silver badge

      Re: So it would appear a Gartner analyst

      > May have some line into his bank account from Broadcom.....

      One of the take always I took from the ElReg synopsis was that: by delaying, businesses are going to make their migration even more expensive…

      1. Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck

        Re: So it would appear a Gartner analyst

        That depends; it also gives the competition time to fill in any gaps in their products.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: So it would appear a Gartner analyst

      I mean.. It's Gartner. The more you pay them, the better they rank you. Nothing new

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Scaremongering for VMWare

    So they're saying it's long and complex.

    We've been downsizing our VMWare for a while, admitedly we already have had Nutanix AHV for quite some time too.

    Migrating from VMWare to AHV has actually been pretty quick with minimal downtime and we've done hundreds of them as nutanix provide the tools to do them.

    I assume the same will be same for other virtualisation stacks.

    Still going to be cheaper in the long run to migrate.

    OK, if you do not alread have a competing hypervisor already on site then yes, it will cost money and time including learning to spin up a whole new hypervisor environment, but relatively speaking shouldn't be too difficult to do.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Scaremongering for VMWare

      We're a small company with quite few VMs and the price rise would be very noticeable and probably not the last. I've told the team we're going to migrate and to start looking at the alternatives.

  7. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    Some recent reports here of what Gartner have said were beginning to show worrying signs of awareness of reality. It's good to see that they're back on form.

  8. An_Old_Dog Silver badge

    Migrations

    * Broadcom/VMware: not a business partner I'd want

    * Oracle: not a business partner I'd want

    * Migrations: been there, done that. Y2K test and remediation, mainframe-> Citrix (Electronic Medical Records) migration, datacenter physical migration (our old landlord jacked up their rent; we said, 'Sayonara'). All with zero downtime.

    We have ~some~ VMware stuff; I'm not anticipating a large problem migrating away from VMware.

    We have a ~lot~ of Oracle stuff; I'm anticipating a much-larger problem migrating away from Oracle. But unlike our other migrations, we don't have to do it all at once. The hard part of this one will be getting an accurate enumeration of departmental apps which connect to our various Oracle DBs. I'm not in the DB group, so I don't know what they're planning, but I suspect they'll use a threefold approach: (1) Query the departments; (2) trace back incoming DB connections; (3) selective, pre-announced, building-by-building, floor-by-floor blocking of Oracle IP connections and listening for the screams.

    With good advance planning and thinking, these migrations can be done.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Migrations

      The hard part with Oracle isn't technical, it's that there aren't any "low hanging fruit" to encourage managers. It costs as much, and more, as you scale down your estate with all benefits being realised as you decommission the very last database. On the plus side, that's the incentive not to stop half way.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    For once a Gartner article that speaks sense, the key bit in the article is the size of organisation and complexity.

    I deal with small organisation with a couple of VM on a single cluster to multiple clusters on one or two sites to the enterprise with hundreds of clusters with tens of thousands of VM spread across the globe. And the report is focused on the enterprise migrations and to be honest their figures are conservative from my experience. Enterprise you will often have hardware, networking, ESX, storage, etc all split across multiple teams never mind thousands of affected apps many with legacy configurations that IT doesn't want to support. Mix in a push for architecture modernisation, hardware and app refresh cycles and maintain business as normal and you have a recipe for a nightmare. For them giving a clear cut figure for ESX Exit isn't so straightforward and if you were to include duplicate hardware, app upgrades, training in new platforms, testing, migration disruption, etc, etc you can see the cost mounting up.

    We have a 25,000 VM split across 200 clusters across the globe ranging from 3 host clusters to 100 host clusters, with 1,500 apps and realistic figure for migration is probably $50m to $100m over 4 years if you included everything. We looked at outsourcing the migration and found the bulk of the cost is things you can't easily outsource as it requires more business knowledge rather than technical skill or manpower. As you can guess, the ESX replacement licensing is a fraction of the cost of the project. And of course the vendor has a migration tool and tells us how wonderful is, that is great for newer VM with a automated build, then have a large number of servers that are hand script builds but at supported OS and then of course the legacy stuff which we don't want to migrate of ESX as OS is no longer supported. And speaking to other enterprise organisation, their challenges are just as bad. Its easy enough for hosting companies to say, yeah we migrated 10,000 VM in a weekend. Sure that little bit of picking up the VM from ESX to some alternate hypervisor is a piece of cake, they don't own the workloads and that is where the challenge is and where outsourcing may not be of great help.

    Timing wise, we started project at beginning of 2023 with a view to finish by end 2026 and that is being optimistic to say the least. So anybody who hasn't started has a long road ahead of them.

    1. Charlie Clark Silver badge
      Thumb Up

      Hobson's choice

      You can see where the old IBM doctrine of mandating two suppliers comes from!

      Nevertheless, staying until the price pressure becomes unbearable is never a viable strategy.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Hobson's choice

        There will always be price pressure, in my environment hosting is a small part of the costs and to be honest any alternate to VMWare comes with its own set of cost challenges. I think the bigger driver is just doing business with Broadcom is unpredictable, well predictable that it will be harder than what you are doing today.

        1. Charlie Clark Silver badge

          Re: Hobson's choice

          Of course, there's always price pressure but this is about the lack of competition.

          The whole point of virtualisation was that it was supposed to be cheaper than buying servers for each service. With increased vertical integration by suppliers we're seeing a move to rent-seeking, especially if we don't act against it. You can look at this as a market failure, but you can also see it as commercial opportunities for those that are prepared to be more flexible.

  10. Blackjack Silver badge

    If the guy is right and people are switching out anyway, then how fck up is VMware that people do want to quit anyway?

    And if he is lying, then he is lying..

    Either way VMware doesn't come out smelling like roses.

    1. OhForF' Silver badge
    2. thames

      I haven't seen the original report, but from what I can gather from what is being written about it, what Gartner are saying is that if you are planning to move, then get on with it now and don't leave it until shortly before your contract with VMWare is about to expire. Too many people are simply waiting to see what everyone else is going to do instead of getting started on it themselves.

      They are also saying that it may be difficult and expensive to move, but if you wait it will be even more expensive and difficult later.

      So they are basically saying, either get on with it or resign yourself to paying through the nose for VMWare.

  11. Pocman

    Broadcom/ESX migrations to Nutanix AHV are nowhere close to these metrics.

    I have personally migrated more than 100 ESX customers with hundreds of VM's over to Nutanix with metrics a fraction of what is outlined here. Now the complexity of taking ESX to AWS or Azure often requires replatforming; so I get that there is a shred of truth to these numbers.....but the switching cost of ESX to AHV in particular is magnitudes less than this article indicates.

    1. thames

      Re: Broadcom/ESX migrations to Nutanix AHV are nowhere close to these metrics.

      I haven't done this myself, but from what I can gather it's the really big customers with really big installations who will find it difficult and expensive to migrate. It will be much less of an issue for smaller customers.

      I suspect that there will be a good business for IT consultants over the next few years in moving small to medium clients from VMWare to an alternative (e.g. Nutanix).

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Broadcom/ESX migrations to Nutanix AHV are nowhere close to these metrics.

        Did you deal with application compatibility, testing, disruption, buying duplicate hardware and licenses ?

    2. This post has been deleted by its author

  12. Rgordon

    This is so dumb.

    The only companies with even a fraction of the issues this dude is predicting, are the ones stupid enough to have signed their VMware contract on top of the pink slips of their entire technical staff... which would have been a blindingly stupid thing to have done in idk, 2012, and if they made it to 2025 without regretting it and hiring some in house staff, they're by design, no longer a tech company, they're a sales, or marketing company.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: This is so dumb.

      You do realise that most enterprises are only on 4 or 5 year contracts that would have been signed before broadcom takeover and have licenses that expire in 2026/7 ?

  13. bpilling

    Audits

    As a software licensing consultant, specialising in VMware, I'm seeing lots of my clients moving away from the platform, mainly into public cloud. A few of them are carrying on with their existing perpetual licensing when contracts expire and using 3rd party support, so they can effect the migration without affecting business apps too much in the interim. One thing to be aware of though is that Broadcom are not averse to auditing - I'm seeing lots of organisations allowing their legacy VMware ELAs expire, deciding against renewing with Broadcom and, a few months later, finding that the vendor now wants to audit them. They're determined to make some revenue somehow.

  14. ReggieRegReg

    Get your own house in order IBM!

    IBM are trying to drum up business for OpenShit and RHEL - sure - remind us what Linux Disto you use for zCX? Sort it!

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