Alternatives to vSphere in Light of Forthcoming Broadcom Changes

When Broadcom acquired VMware in November 2023, partners and clients alike were expecting changes, but in the months following the acquisition, the changes have included business structure, partner requirements, licensing structure, product lines, and pricing. Some long-time customers of VMware are discovering that their solution is no longer working for them. If you are one of these customers, we have put together this list of alternatives to vSphere to help you decide what’s next.

To understand what you need in a virtualization program, ask yourself what aspects of VMware vSphere you are using. What made it the right fit for your business?

A leader in virtualization, vSphere can manage large volumes of data and support a wide range of applications. It requires no conversions for apps between on-prem and public cloud, and it’s easy to scale.

For those interested in keeping VMware vSphere, it is now being offered in bundles. The most popular ones include VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), built for mid-sized and enterprise level businesses, respectively. These solutions bundle commonly used VMware products into one package. However, vSphere users are facing uncertainty about offerings, partnerships, and pricing, pushing them to look into alternatives to vSphere. Broadcom has eliminated perpetual licenses and discontinued many partnerships, making a vSphere provider harder to find.

Workloads on the public cloud are scalable and accessible, and leveraging native services can create a similar model to vSphere. This solution may be ideal for businesses that already utilize the public cloud. If your business uses VMware because it wants to keep data off the cloud, this might not be the solution you’re looking for. Because this method takes your workloads off-prem, you will have to consider data sovereignty, security, and SLA adherence. It also requires gathering several native services to equal vSphere services.

For those deterred by vSphere’s increase in price, Kernel Based Virtual Machines may be the solution you’re looking for. KVM is open-source and can offer cost savings compared to proprietary solutions like VMware. An example of these is Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) which is a stable and widely supported distribution. It is not without its drawbacks, though. Migrating from VMware to KVM might involve some level of complexity in terms of reconfiguring and retooling your infrastructure.

One of VMware’s direct competitors, Nutanix HCI offers a hyper-converged infrastructure solution that integrates compute, storage, and virtualization in a single appliance. Acropolis Hypervisor is specifically designed to work seamlessly with Nutanix hardware and replace vSphere. The transition isn’t a seamless one, though. Transitioning to HCI introduces large technical change to their data center architecture. Clients cannot manage third-party storage via Nutanix.

vSphere is available through private cloud providers to provide some distance between your business and the changes VMware is undergoing. Outsourcing infrastructure management to a trusted service provider like 11:11 can alleviate the burden of managing hardware and data centers. Leveraging vSphere in a private cloud environment offers familiarity and compatibility. However, introducing a third-party provider also introduces new considerations such as data sovereignty, security, and SLA adherence.

“Change is the only constant.”

With the constant changes VMware is undergoing, it can be difficult for VMware clients to create a long-term IT strategy. Whether you need help keeping up with VMware’s changes, or you’re ready for a change of your own, the experts at Adapture can help. Our vendor-agnostic approach means that we can help you evaluate a number of alternatives to vSphere to ensure that you find the best solution for your environment.