Navigating the New VMware and Your Future Virtualization Strategy

For the last several years, organizations haven’t needed to think about their virtualization needs. The choice was straightforward: for virtualization, no one was better than VMware.

Today, we understand that the choice isn’t so clear. The Broadcom acquisition introduced a number of new services to VMware’s virtualization capabilities, but for some organizations, the new bundled offerings may not be the best fit for their IT environment.

Several of our customers are beginning to ask the question: what is our strategy going forward?

Before making your decision, the first thing we recommend is taking time to understand the new VMware terms, conditions and licenses. Our license assessment can help you to understand how dependent you are on the VMware ecosystem currently and if you’ll need to make a short-term renewal, even if you eventually plan to migrate.

Regardless of the path you choose, CDW can advise you on the next steps:

• Staying on VMware: Manage the shift from perpetual licensing to subscription/consumption models and upgrade to vSphere Foundation or VCF bundles. CDW offers assessments designed to guide customers in their continued journey with VMware.
• VM lift and shift: Migration to a different virtual machine platform offers a relatively straightforward path, maintains many existing skills and infrastructure investments, and minimizes significant business interruption. CDW can help customers stay on-premises or move to a hybrid or cloud model.
• Modernize: These VMware changes could be a great opportunity to modernize. CDW supports customers in three core pathways: virtualization with app modernization, container-first with virtual machine support and complete containerization.
• Unsure: Still determining your path forward? CDW offers a variety of advisory engagements to help you make the best decision for your business.

If you decide to stay on VMware for the foreseeable future, here are a few of the features you can expect to see:

• VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF): a full-stack, private cloud solution with integrated, enterprise-class compute, networking, storage, management and security.
• VMware vSphere Foundation: an enterprise workload engine built to optimize the IT infrastructure for organizations of all sizes by providing intelligent operations management, a high-performing infrastructure, and elevated security and compliance features in one solution.
• VMware Live Recovery: a cyber and data resiliency solution designed to provide unified protection for ransomware and disaster recovery across the cloud in one unified console, accelerated recovery and simplified consumption with flexible licensing across use cases and clouds.

If you decide to continue using virtual machines as your primary deployment method, you can migrate your VMs to another hypervisor platform like MSFT Hyper-V, Nutanix AHV or RedHat OpenStack.

This approach is familiar and may ultimately be less disruptive for your organization. However, the costs and vendor lock-in could be restricting. Here are a few questions you should ask yourself before embarking on this journey:

• What are your team’s skills and experience with containerization and other technologies?
• Where are most workloads staying for the near future?
• What expertise do your teams have to manage VMs for the near future?
• What is your timing or is there an impending event?

Application modernization lays the foundation for containerization. Containerization packages the application for efficient and portable deployment. Kubernetes orchestrates and manages containerized applications for optimal performance and scalability.

This approach offers agility and speed, improved resource utilization, resilience and scalability, and — most significantly — vendor independence. However, a container-first approach requires significant development effort and has a steep learning curve. Here are a few questions you should ask yourself before choosing this strategy:

• How are your applications suited for containerization?
• What are the biggest challenges you face in application modernization?
• How do you feel about managing both VMs and containerized applications?
• How are you addressing any potential skill gaps within your team?

Whether you’re staying on VMware or charting a migration, you need a partner who can help you on all fronts. We understand there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach.

CDW works collaboratively with our customers and their teams — from labs to production — to train and champion their organization, not replace it. CDW can help you upskill staff, choose and implement the right solution, support VDI infrastructure and modernize applications.