Escaping the VMware trap?

Jarle Bjørgeengen

Chief Product Officer

These changes, after Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, have led to higher long-term costs for many customers, especially smaller businesses that may see dramatic increases in their annual renewal fees.

Background

VMware was a leading software company in the field of on-premise datacenter virtualisation technology that creates an abstraction layer over computer hardware. In many ways VMware pioneered the usage of virtual servers on top of “common off the shelf” (COTS) Intel-based server hardware during the 2000s. They became the first choice for many on-premise data centre workloads even though other and less known alternatives did and do exist.

The Safespring alternative

Safespring uses the OpenStack and CEPH open source projects to build production quality Infrastructure as a Service in multiple physical data centre locations in the Nordics. At the core, both VMware and OpenStack are all about managing virtual machines (VMs), thus, Safespring ought to be a great alternative to VMware, right? Well, as always, it depends! Most of all, it depends on your ability and motivation to automate infrastructure and operating system management.

Traditionally, VMware and specialised tooling companies provided tools to first migrate physical machines to virtual machines using image capture technologies for the hard drives (P2V) and subsequently using virtual disk images as a means to manage upgrades and migrations.

While this seems like a good approach in the short term, we think it only postpones the need to manage VMs, disks, and networks separate from VM operating systems and with operating system configuration management tools like Cfengine, Puppet, Chef and orchestration tools like Salt and Ansible, commonly referred to as “infrastructure as code”, or IAC. This approach allowed for IAC to be managed using the same kind of version control systems seen in cloud-native application development, thus improving flexibility, stability and automation level also on the infrastructure side of things.

So, to be blunt, the usefulness of any IaaS service as a replacement for VMware, or similar kinds of on-premise virtual infrastructure management tools, depends strongly on the willingness and ability to automate and manage the infrastructure provisioning, the operating system configuration (including workload deployment) and state management (data dumps, object storage, backups etc.) separately from VM images and snapshots. Thus, if you already manage your VMware workload like this, Safespring could nearly be a drop in replacement by only rewriting the infrastructure code, using, for instance, our community provided Terraform modules.

Of course, you can take OpenStack for a spin by yourself, as described in the Openstack open source project description of “Migrating from VMware to OpenStack: Optimizing your Infrastructure to Save Money and Avoid Vendor-Lock-in”. However, if you are looking for a minimum effort alternative, why not just buy the managed service experience and let the professionals take care of the somewhat complex task of Operating OpenStack in a secure and stable manner.

Closing the gap

Safespring offers a free assessment service to estimate the key activities needed to migrate your workloads from VMware to the Safespring platform.

The assessment can be adapted to each customer’s needs, but the following activity list outlines the evaluation:

1. Identify which VMware products are in use.
2. Identify which features of the products are used, for which purposes, and to what extent.
3. Identify the distribution of operating systems for VM workloads and the level of automation and tools in use for managing operating systems and their workloads.
4. Identify container workloads and tools used to deploy them.
5. For workloads evaluated to be reasonably easy to migrate, create a proof of concept (POC) to try out Safespring as a new destination for the workloads.
6. Based on the POC outcome, create a complete migration plan for all workloads verified to be compatible with Safespring.

The service is free, and the only requirement from you is to first qualify by answering a short survey about your current in-house experience with automated infrastructure management tools and practices. Once qualified, we ask you dedicate resources with sufficient knowledge to work with us to first carry out the assessment and then create the migration plans and automation code to deploy the necessary infrastructure to deploy workloads onto.