University IT chief: 'We count ourselves lucky we're not on VMware'

Nutanix .Next event saw customers looking for alternatives

Since its $61 billion takeover by Broadcom last year, customers of pre-eminent virtualisation software VMware have been nervously awaiting the parent company's next moves on licencing and pricing.

Few will have been reassured by Broadcom's recent announcements.

The fine detail of Broadcom's long-term plans for VMware is not yet clear. However, what is certain is that it will simplify the product line and do away with perpetual licences for all VMware products, transitioning to a subscription-only model. It also seems to be refocussing its attention onto large enterprise customers, which is both where the money is and where alternatives are not immediately accessible. This has left many smaller companies worrying about having their needs neglected.

So what are the alternatives for VMware customers? Well, that depends on the other VMware products deployed as part of their individual agreements with the vendor, and what resides in their datacentre.

Customers with hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) running VMware hypervisor on Nutanix may find it convenient to switch to that vendor's own hypervisor AHV, which is what two customers attending the Nutanix .Next event in Barcelona had done. It's also the path the company claims 60%-70% of customers in this position are pursuing.

"We count ourselves lucky we were able to do that before, and we're not on VMware now," said Justin Mason, associate director of vendor and operations at University of Canberra in Australia. "Other universities with large VMware installations are talking to us now. They're in a bit of a sticky situation."

Canberra University was an early adopter of the Nutanix HCI platform, which it deployed on top of VMware ESX, downsizing its datacentre from 40 racks to three. It was also an early adopter of Nutanix AHV hypervisor, with which it began proofs-of-concept in 2017.

With its virtualised infrastructure supporting mission-critical applications, the university's 50 strong in-house IT team and 50 outsourced Wipro engineers had their doubts about the wisdom of adopting AHV. But the university could not afford to double up.

"VMware was costing us extra money. It wasn't exactly cheap then and it's worse now," Mason said. "But we were lucky enough at that time to be looking at the next technology advancement."

AHV turned out to be stable with "pretty much feature parity with VMware", meaning the university was able to cut out that vendor, saving money and easing management overhead.

Another customer that removed the VMware layer before the Broadcom deal went through is US gambling and hospitality company Boyd Gaming. Boyd was also running Nutanix on VMware, but questioned the need for two hypervisors. "We ran a bake-off between AHV and VMware", said CIO Gregg Lowe.

The move to AHV-only was justified on cost, management and security grounds (one hypervisor to patch rather than two) and migrating 5,000 servers took around 18 months, the relatively lengthy timescale being the result of zero tolerance for any downtime: "Someone somewhere is gambling 24/7."

Broadcom's plans

So why would Broadcom spend $61 billion on a company only to alienate many of its customers? If that's true (which the compay rejects), the obvious answer is that it wishes to focus on the lucrative large enterprise market, and on streamlining VMware's product lines to make them more manageable and cost-efficient.

Another theory, one advanced by Lowe, is that Broadcom plans to make the most of a captive user base while it can, given the lengthy hardware replacement cycle at large organisations. It could be a "fantastic revenue stream" over the next five to seven years, after which the company will consider its options.

A Broadcom spokesperson told Computing: "We are following standard industry practice in moving to a subscription system, as we announced and started to implement long ago. We are confident that these complaints [that Broadcom may deprioritise the development of VMware ESX, taking advantage of the fact that many are effectively locked in] lack merit and we will proceed with our pro-competitive initiatives."

Towards a standalone Nutanix hypervisor

For many, perhaps most, replacing VMware ESX with an alternative hypervisor is not feasible. Which begs the question of why Nutanix doesn't release AVH as a standalone product.

It simply wasn't a priority before as previously there was no real demand, said Rajiv Ramaswami, Nutanix CEO, during a press briefing. Also, while the company claims that AHV offers functional parity with ESX, it lacks certification with the same range of hardware vendors and workloads.

However, since the Broadcom takeover, Nutanix has fast forwarded moves in that direction. Traditionally on Nutanix, storage and compute both run on the same underlying hardware, but soon it will be possible to run separate compute and storage nodes.

The .Next event saw an announcement of a deal with Dell to offer Nutanix Cloud Platform on Dell PowerFlex software-defined storage. There will also be Dell HCI appliance that features Nutanix Cloud Platform and Dell PowerEdge servers. The company hasn't announced a release date for the latter, but it is pencilled in for the end of this year.

"On Dell PowerEdge servers, on what we call VSAN-ready nodes, you will be able to expand the range of nodes on which the whole stack runs. In addition, we're going to expand the footprint where the compute-only hypervisor can also run," said Nutanix SVP engineering, Indu Keri.

Nutanix has also expanded its agreement with Cisco, with support for Cisco UCS servers to run AHV as compute-only nodes also planned.

Asked whether he saw the changes at VMware as an opportunity, Ramaswamai said he did.

"VMware was a great company. I spent many years of my life there, and it's great technology, great people, great company," he said. "But it's a different company now, under different ownership. It's a different company with a very different philosophy."