Gartner: ‘VMware migration is costly, but won’t get cheaper’

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Gartner estimates that a migration away from VMware for large customers will soon take a year or two, with a cost per virtual machine of up to $3,000. Delay, however, will make the move even more painful.

Those who have felt held hostage by Broadcom since its acquisition of VMware and want to escape will need time and money to do so. That conclusion from Gartner surprises no one, but the analysts also calculated how much. To do so, they look at large organizations with 2,000 virtual machines (VMs) or more, running on a hundred servers or more.

According to Gartner, migrating a single VM will cost you $300 to $3,000 when you hire outside help. Just skimming the market already looking for a suitable alternative is work for 10 full-time profiles for a month. Technical evaluation of those alternatives is another nine months of work for about six people. How complex the planning and testing process is depends on the complexity of the infrastructure.

Not a virtualization specialist but a networkvendor

The way organizations look at Broadcom and VMware is a major hurdle for the migration process. That’s what Gartner tells The Register. Many organizations view Broadcom primarily as a virtualization specialist, but that’s incorrect. Companies looking to migrate from the entire VMware stack need to view that stack and the company through a different lens. According to Gartner, VMware is first and foremost a networking vendor, then a storage specialist, third a provider of management tools and only fourth a virtualization partner.

Those who want to move away from VMware should explore a migration that way. In fact, migrating hypervisors is the least complex problem. Networking, storage and management tools are less easily transferred.

We want to migrate its VMs, in other words, must migrate the entire infrastructure. This implies that companies should not think of their VMware stack as a monolith, but should dissect it. Then the task is to rebuild that stack with other parties.

It doesn’t get any cheaper

Gartner notes that organizations are waiting to see what others are doing. This does not make the problem less complex, but it does make it more expensive. After all, those trapped with Broadcom are paying higher and higher licensing fees. Those are ticking up, while migration costs are not going down.

However, the market is eager to offer alternatives. Red Hat not coincidentally launched its OpenShift Virtualization Engine last week, including VM migration capabilities from VMware.