Whether it was the recent announcements from Broadcom, or you’ve just been considering your on-premises or private cloud hypervisor stack for a while, you might be thinking, what are my alternatives?  Well, there are a few, all with pros and cons, so let me give you a whirlwind tour from the perspective of Appcentric.

• Stay on-prem with the likes of Nutanix or Proxmox 
• A middle ground, VMware on Public Cloud
• Consider native cloud such as AWS or Azure
• A hybrid setup

VMware on <insert big cloud provider here>

This is an interesting one.  The pro has to be, by leveraging HCX you don’t have to re-IP your servers.  That’s going to definitely expedite migration and should be seen as the big positive.  And if you’re wanting to expand and retract your workloads to public cloud for say DR, or seasonal events, this is a great way to achieve this.  But, from what I’ve seen, the con is the price.  You pay for this flexibility, and, if you are considering ditching VMware, then keeping a vCenter running to manage it all probably isn’t palatable.  Furthermore, do you really want to have an all servers in the cloud footprint?

Native Cloud

I’m sure AWS and Azure are delighted with what’s happening at Broadcom, as there will be a significant number of customers out there who’ll finally bite the bullet to adopt public cloud.  The headaches we’ve seen with these types of migration are often the changing of the network layer, and having a truly up to date understanding of the interdependencies of your applications.  Appcentric have had excellent success stories leveraging our portal to map the infrastructure, business functions and teams to applications, and then augmenting the vendor tooling to simply lift and shift migrations.  We believe this levels the playing field when compared to HCX and VMware on public cloud. 

In terms of native cloud adoption, I’d never really recommend an all IaaS footprint.  But, that’s probably me being a techie.  Applying some pragmatism to the situation, there is a need to consider the priorities of your business.  Under the remit of this blog, moving away from VMware may be the priority, and if so, moving all your applications to the public cloud may be the first step of the transition, and when there a review can be made on application lifecycles, 3-5 plans and what flagship applications need some modern architecture love.

Hybrid Setup

One thing that is very important these days is looking at the cloud, whatever the flavour, as a tool, not an all or nothing.  Some workloads are brilliant in the public cloud, especially those that can be move to PaaS/SaaS or don’t required 24/7 operations.  But on the flip side of that coin, workloads such as SAP at scale, don’t really work in an IaaS landscape.  Large compute requirements, always available and often with DEV and Pre-Prod deployments for releases mean they can be very cost prohibitive.  That’s where a near cloud consideration should be made, pick your public cloud vendor of choice, but then consider an Equinix or NextDC, where they provide hosting with excellent multi-cloud connectivity.  Paying for a server and then running it hard 24/7 will cost a lot less than buying the equivalent compute in a market leader, and this approach also minimises the latency concerns.  This option is more about knowing your workloads, knowing what platform makes the most sense from a connectivity, performance and cost perspective.  If you truly know this, then 2024 is a wonderful time to consider modern IT architecture, with many tools and options available.

Some people might think that the recent changes at Broadcom/VMware are destructive or will have a negative effect on their day to day business, and for some those thoughts will be founded.  But this could also be seen as an opportunity.  Is it time to re-think how your infrastructure is hosted in 2024? Is this the motivator needed to get your CXO interested in a migration project?  This all might seem a bit overwhelming, but don’t worry, there are people here to help.  Reach out to us at Sales@appcentric.com.au today if you’d like to discuss your specific challenges with us.