What Alternatives Exist to vSphere?
Given the announcement from Broadcom following their recent acquisition of VMware that some partners will lose access to the VMware partner program and potentially the ability to transact VMware licensing as a result, it makes sense to have a look at what other options exist in the world of virtualisation and hypervisors that could be viable replacements for partners who wish to explore other options.
Option 1: AHV
The first option that comes to most people’s minds, and certainly the one that has been discussed most often amongst media publishers is Nutanix, and their Acropolis Hypervisor. For customers who have bought into the HCI story and are looking to move off of both VSAN and vSphere, this could be a compelling option. Nutanix has a strong presence in the industry and with that comes a degree of confidence in both the capability of the solution as well as integration and continued efforts to integrate with other vendors, such as Citrix, Veeam, and of course Cisco. As someone who hasn’t used Nutanix in-depth personally, I can only comment on what I have heard from others in regards to usability and performance, which has been a largely positive experience for most users. The two biggest weaknesses that I see in a Nutanix migration option are the reduced options available for external storage, and integrations that tend to lag behind other vendors in terms of either capability or performance, if not both. In what could be either a positive or a negative, the Nutanix portfolio is actually much more broad than most people realise, with options available for Orchestration, Network Function Virtualisation, Database-as-a-Service amongst others, and likely there will be ongoing developments in this space given the recent acquisition of some of the assets from D2IQ that will flow into their product. The caveat here is that while the solution offering is extremely broad, you’ll likely be hard pressed to find anyone who actually is aware of it, letalone uses it.
Option 2: Hyper-V
Despite what some people are saying, Hyper-V is still available and usable in 2023, and is still supported as far as I am aware. Managing it may be a bit more difficult with the removal of Hyper-V Server, but it can still be done. Hyper-V has a strong advantage in the “integration with others” space given it’s longevity in the space and the backing of the weight of Microsoft to help push ongoing development from other technology vendors. Unlike Nutanix, the options available for third-party storage arrays are fairly widely supported and there are plenty of workers around who know their way around the solution or could get up to speed with it quickly. Unlike AHV, given the indications from Microsoft that they are shuffling everyone towards Azure-Stack HCI, it may be that the move to Hyper-V ends up becoming a stepping stone towards another technology provider altogether as the focus from Microsoft in the past decade or so has been very strongly towards a public-cloud first approach, especially its own.
Option 3: Proxmox
The dark-horse in the race and one that may be a surprise winner for many. With a low penetration into mid-enterprise, Proxmox is a solution most closely associated with homelab users and SMB IT, but it does seem to tick all the boxes for most users looking for a simple virtualisation solution to host a few small VM’s and some storage. For the small (3 or less hosts) IT environment, it’s likely to be a compelling option for many purchasers. The third-party integration is the biggest concern here, as most enterprise vendors are unlikely to offer any significant or official support for Proxmox for the foreseeable future, and a best-effort endeavour for product compatibility. Personally, as an Australian-based individual, the lack of around-the-clock support is the biggest detractor from using this as a primary solution. It’s not necessarily a show-stopper, but it would mean that going through the process of changing anything would require more planning and contingency than would be necessarily needed for a similar change for an alternative hypervisor platform.
Other Options:
There’s also the “also-ran’s”. Solutions that are available and have their own strengths and weaknesses that may be suitable for an individual company but not for a wide audience. These include solutions such as Red Hat Virtualisation, OpenStack and KubeVirt. All offer their own compelling use cases, but in most cases will not be as suitable for the typical IT provider. I would like to personally see a strong improvement in KubeVirt from a usability perspective as it offers an interesting proposition to the market that closes the gap between the VM crowd and the containerisation crowd, providing a single platform that would enable the extended capabilities offered by Kubernetes to come to the traditional VM environment, and bring VM’s closer to the bleeding edge of innovation where they have been lagging for quite some time.
There’s also the other-other option of just keeping VMware. At least in the interim it’s probably best to stick to the devil you know while you assess other options. Or just lift-and-shift to a public cloud provider and pretend that you can ignore it for a while.
