VMware ushers in a new age … just not the one it wants!

VMware’s been slow to adopt the shift to subscription licenses but it’s now here and it’s now priced per CPU core with no separate licence for vCenter required. That’s an increase in cost to clients but comes with some great new features such as enhanced lifecycle management, capacity visibility, and developer services that runs enterprise-grade K8s on vSphere.

But a lot of clients are just focused on the increased price rise, and are they okay with this?

Then there’s the uncertainty surrounding the effect of Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware. Are clients happy with this Broadcom acquisition?

Well the above two factors are resulting in many clients looking for, and considering, alternatives. That’s ushering in a new era that could marginalise VMware.

Virtualisation is a great technology. Without it, just consider the amount of extra tin there would be in data centres. So there’s value in vSphere and its cost is still less than that alternative … unless the alternative is commodity software – KVM. Or that new era I’ve alluded to – containers. Bear with me here.

As part of the forthcoming 2023 State of Production Kubernetes report, Spectro Cloud surveyed 333 IT professionals that work with Kubernetes in production. 86% of them said they wanted to unify their containerized and VM workloads on a single infrastructure platform. In the current multi-cloud world where repatriation of workloads to on-prem data centres is prevalent, the benefits of doing this are many – only one platform to manage, reduced cost, efficiencies, accelerated IDP, improved app dev productivity, etc.

But can you really run production critical applications in a container environment? As easily as you can run K8s in a VMware environment? And can you manage that single VM and containerK8s environment well? Spectro Cloud proves that you can.

Kubernetes is acknowledged to be a beast to deploy, configure and, more importantly, support. Throw VMs into it leveraging KubeVirt and you’ve just amplified the complexity. That’s if you do it all manually and rely on individuals’ knowledge and skills. Spectro Cloud’s Palette provides an enterprise-grade solution to orchestrate the K8s cluster stack that massively simplifies the complexity, and provides full support services.

I’m not going to delve into Palette in this blog (Spectro Cloud has a good overview video here – https://www.spectrocloud.com/get-started). The highlight take away is that you can adopt, run and support full-stack K8s clusters with relative ease through Palette – you won’t need a deep level of knowledge of K8s to do so. And that includes running VMs within K8s. Plus it enables running K8s on bare metal. These core features, coupled with persistent storage through a product such as Portworx, provides a genuine alternative to using a hypervisor and, therefore, a valid alternative to vSphere.

Now imagine if you could not only do this in the Public Cloud or data centre, but also at the edge with only two nodes. Spectro Cloud supports Public Clouds and data centres right now with two node edge functionality on the way.

VMware’s subscription licensing and acquisition is pushing clients away. Spectro Cloud Palette is pulling clients to a viable alternative. Is a new era about to emerge where K8s is the consistent, single run platform across the multi-cloud?

Well … as Spectro Cloud has a free tier of Palette with the only restriction being a cap on monthly consumption, the great thing is that you can develop and test this potential new era right now with minimal investment. Then as your confidence with the solution grows, you could transition dev & test to it, followed by tier 2/3 applications, and finally those production critical apps. You wouldn’t be the first and the pay off could be considerable.

 

Nigel Pyne

Principal Architect, Natilik

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