The great virtualisation reset: How to take control of your VMware costs
For many organisations, virtualisation has been the foundation of their IT infrastructure for years. But following Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, the licensing landscape has changed significantly – and for some organisations, so has the cost of staying where they are.
Since VMware moved away from perpetual licensing and changed from per-CPU to per-core pricing, organisations have been faced with potentially significant increases when it comes to renewal. With renewal pricing often only becoming clear around 90 days before the renewal date, IT teams can find themselves with limited time to understand their options and make a strategic decision.
So, what can organisations do?
The answer isn’t necessarily to rip out VMware overnight. There are several options worth exploring, from optimising your existing environment through to migrating workloads to an alternative hypervisor such as HPE Morpheus VM Essentials.
Start with understanding what you already have
Before making any major changes to your virtualisation environment, it makes sense to understand exactly how that environment is being used.
Many organisations have virtual machines that are overprovisioned, meaning they may be paying for more CPU and memory capacity than they actually need. Identifying this unused capacity can provide an opportunity to optimise the existing VMware estate before considering a wider migration.
That means decisions can be based on what your environment actually looks like, rather than assumptions.
Could modernising your infrastructure reduce costs?
Understanding what you already have can also highlight opportunities to modernise the underlying infrastructure. Older hardware can be less efficient from both a compute and energy perspective, so moving to newer generations of infrastructure could potentially reduce the number of cores required while also delivering savings around power and cooling.
This is particularly important when considering the wider cost of your virtualisation environment. The cheapest option isn’t always simply the one with the lowest software licence price. Looking at infrastructure, energy consumption, capacity utilisation and licensing together gives you a much clearer picture of the total cost.
Introducing HPE Morpheus VM Essentials
For organisations looking for an alternative to VMware, HPE Morpheus VM Essentials provides another route.
At its core is the HPE Morpheus Hypervisor (HVM), based on Ubuntu and KVM. The platform has evolved beyond a basic hypervisor and provides capabilities including high availability, live migration and management of multiple clusters through a single interface.
One of the key advantages is that organisations don’t necessarily need to make a big-bang move.
HPE Morpheus VM Essentials can manage both HVM and existing ESXi clusters from a single management view. This means organisations can introduce the platform alongside their existing VMware environment and migrate workloads progressively, rather than having to move everything at once.
It is also hardware agnostic, meaning it can run on supported x86 hardware rather than requiring organisations to purchase HPE hardware alongside the software.
You don’t have to choose between VMware and HPE Morpheus overnight
One of the biggest concerns with changing virtualisation platforms is the migration itself.
The good news is that HPE Morpheus VM Essentials can be introduced alongside an existing VMware environment. This creates the opportunity to take a phased approach: start with suitable workloads, build confidence in the new platform and gradually migrate rather than attempting to transform the entire environment in one go.
HPE also provides migration capabilities within VM Essentials, while Zerto can support larger-scale VM migrations. During the webinar, the team discussed an offer providing Zerto with 25 VM licences for a year for £1, subject to the stated eligibility requirements.
There is also a VM Essentials Migration Advantage Programme, under which customers purchasing a three- or five-year VM Essentials subscription can receive the first year at no charge, helping organisations avoid paying twice for virtualisation while they run VMware and complete their migration.
More than just a hypervisor
While the licensing savings are an important consideration, HPE Morpheus is designed to provide broader hybrid cloud management capabilities.
The platform can provide a unified management view across different environments and workloads, with capabilities extending beyond virtual machines to areas such as containers, bare metal and hybrid cloud management.
There are also different tiers available, allowing organisations to start with the capabilities they need and move to higher tiers as their requirements evolve. The same management console and upgrade path can be retained as organisations expand their use of the platform.
This gives organisations the flexibility to take a more measured approach to modernising their virtualisation estate.
Start your virtualisation review with Kubus
Kubus can help you assess your current virtualisation environment, identify opportunities to optimise existing resources and model different scenarios for the future.
Our team can help you explore whether HPE Morpheus VM Essentials could work within your environment, what a phased migration could look like and where there may be opportunities to reduce your overall virtualisation costs.
