We are officially out of the vSphere monopoly era.
Nearly three years since Broadcom’s licensing shake-up, and organizations chose among three distinct paths: hyperscale cloud, alternative hypervisors, or staying put (though likely with new partners or channels). What most didn’t see coming was that the real cost wasn’t just the platform licensing; it was how the platform shifts affected their resilience posture, regardless of which path they chose.
Which path(s) did you take?
video transcript
To Broadcom or not to Broadcom … that really is a question.
We are officially no longer in a vSphere monopolistic era.
It used to be that for enterprise-grade virtualization, there was only one hypervisor of choice … and that while cloud-hosting was good for many things, it wasn’t universally viable. Both of those boundary conditions are no longer true.
It’s been nearly 3 years since we started hearing all the fallout of the sweeping changes of Broadcom that included significant increases in vSphere licensing, as well as a radical reduction in the breadth of partners that can actually deliver vSphere to organizations of all sizes. Early on, there was a huge amount of emotional hype that everyone was gonna leave Broadcom and they were going to stop using vSphere (that didn’t happen). But organizations really were given at least three different paths.
- Some started moving as many workloads as they can could to hyperscale cloud hosts; and then realized that cloud hosting is not free. Many orgs ended up repatriating some of those workloads back to the datacenter. Cloud hosting is great if you have a “cloud smart” strategy and (vs) not just a “cloud first” policy.
- Some embraced alternative hypervisors because they really are some good vSphere alternatives now, but there’s often two caveats:
- Will your data protection resilience management stacks have equitable protection and recovery capabilities for those other hypervisors? Bonus points if you can protect a workload on one hypervisor and recover it to another as a migration method.
- Does the costs of running multiple hypervisors, reskilling your employees, possibly supplementing management tools — do those costs save you versus what Broadcom was going to increment your charges? For some the savings was worth it and they even unlocked new capabilities along the way. Others found the costs of switching was actually more expensive than the cost of staying.
- And many others stayed with vSphere, but they had to find different partners that they could maintain/grow their licenses through or even more creative ways to utilize the Broadcom technology stacks through different consumption models.
What many folks underestimated was how changing the foundation of their production platforms would have significant ramifications on their ability to ensure the resilience of their overall IT stack due to a lack of equitable protection and recovery capabilities across hypervisors, hyperscale clouds, and back again.
This line of questioning will be a significant part of DPM’s Resilience Architectures for 2027 research, launching this fall, but in the meantime: Which of those 3 paths did you choose (many chose more than one) and how are you ensuring the resilience of your new IT foundation?
Leave your thoughts on the LinkedIn article.