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Don’t sacrifice protection while you’re modernizing production. Two years after Broadcom changed the vSphere licensing and the fervor of an exodus started, let’s revisit how it turned out and what it means for Disaster Recovery and Cyber Resilience depending on your hypervisors and hyperscale clouds.

video transcript

Two years ago, I helped assess the sentiment of 550 CIOs towards Broadcom and what their orgs were going to do with vSphere in light of the licensing changes.

• Some orgs anticipated scaling back their use of vsphere; but exactly 0% expected to stop using vSphere completely.
• Some orgs had an emotional reaction for an exodus, but when they start exploring the operational costs of switching and/or the labor and tool burden of running multiple hypervisors, all sudden the price increases weren’t as bad as they thought.
• Others realized that not all hypervisors are equitable – and perhaps even more importantly – not all management stacks and backup/DR solutions can accommodate hypervisors beyond just vSphere maybe Hyper-V. 

That was two years ago.

A key truth, then and now, is — Do NOT sacrifice protection (aka resilience) while you are modernizing (or evolving) production.

Fast forward to today and we are in a post-vSphere era, or more accurately in a post-monopoly era. vSphere still dominates, but there is more than one enterprise worthy hypervisor now and several of the leading backup, DR, and cyber resilience vendors do have equitable capabilities across a more diverse range of hypervisors and hyperscale clouds today.

That’s really exciting because competition drives innovation!

Since then, some organizations initially moved their non-critical VMs to other hypervisors and realized “They run pretty well over here … and our favorite tools do work with them” and have continued to embrace alternative hypervisors.

That said, I had a really thought-provoking conversation with the CEO of one of Broadcom’s larger and often lauded partners; he suggested that “As organizations look for modern hybrid private clouds, there are really 3 viable stacks today: Azure, Amazon, and VCF”, with the inference being that:

Even if the hypervisors are relatively equitable … and the backup/cyber/management stacks are cross-capable … what else is necessary in an ecosystem for organizations to gain the agility of cloud yet retain the manageability of self-governed infrastructure

So, what do you think?

• Did you stick with vSphere because of the capabilities and cloud foundation?
• Or did you add or change hypervisors (or hyperscales) and discover equitable experiences?

Leave your thoughts below or send me a message, I’d love to hear your perspective.