George Crump

November 7, 2025 by George Crump

Universities are leaving VMware for two main reasons. First, the Broadcom acquisition changed the economics of virtualization. Second, premature hardware deprecation often forces server refreshes years earlier than scheduled. Educational discounts vanished. Per-core licensing turned predictable capital expenses into escalating operational costs. Support quality declined. For many institutions, the math no longer works.

The question is no longer whether to consider alternatives. The question is how to execute a successful exit without disrupting operations, exhausting small IT teams, or requiring massive capital investment.

Why Universities Are Leaving VMware

The reasons universities are leaving VMware remain consistent across institutions. Annual licensing costs that once ranged from $20,000 to $25,000 now climb to $45,000 to $55,000 or higher. For institutions operating on lean budgets, this represents money that could fund scholarships, faculty positions, or student services. VMware and competing platforms often require certified hardware or push expensive infrastructure upgrades. Universities with viable servers that are 3 to 5 years old are told they need to spend $50,000 to $70,000 on replacements.

Educational institutions report longer response times, unanswered support tickets, and reduced access to technical resources, even with paid support contracts. Product consolidation, feature changes, and bundle restructuring create uncertainty about long-term viability and cost predictability. These factors combine to make the exit decision less about dissatisfaction and more about survival.

What Higher Education Cannot Compromise

Any VMware alternative must meet the unique needs of higher education without forcing tradeoffs that compromise operations. Learning management systems, student information systems, and research workloads cannot tolerate extended downtime, so small teams need platforms that are easy to manage without specialized expertise or additional staff. The solution must reduce the total cost of ownership rather than shift expenses around, and existing infrastructure should remain usable to avoid capital expenditures. Built-in backup, disaster recovery, and ransomware protection eliminate the need for separate tools and vendors. The platform should support student learning and provide hands-on IT experience that prepares them for careers.

The challenge is finding a solution that checks all these boxes without compromise.

Why Universities are leaving VMware for VergeOS

Universities are migrating from VMware to VergeOS because it was designed around the constraints most institutions face: limited budgets and small teams. The platform unifies virtualization, storage, networking, data protection, and AI into a single software codebase. This means one interface for all infrastructure management, not separate consoles for compute, storage arrays, network switches, and backup tools. A two or three-person IT team can manage the entire stack without specialized training in storage protocols or network fabric configuration.

The hardware-agnostic architecture separates VergeOS from alternatives that require certified hardware. VergeOS runs on commodity x86 servers from any vendor. Universities can repurpose HPE Gen9 through Gen11 servers, Dell PowerEdge systems, or white box hardware without concern for compatibility matrices or certified hardware lists. This eliminates the forced refresh cycle that turns a software decision into a six-figure capital expense. Institutions keep using servers with remaining useful life and redirect the budget to academic priorities.

Universities are leaving VMware for better data resiliency

Universities are also leaving VMware due to the high cost and complexity of its availability and data resiliency features. Conversely, high availability, replication, and disaster recovery are built into the core platform of VergeOS, not add-on products with separate licensing. Institutions can replicate between campus data centers or create DR sites using repurposed older hardware. Universities have similar DR requirements to K-12 Education.

VergeOS’ ransomware protection includes immutable snapshots and rapid recovery without needing a separate backup infrastructure. The platform handles these functions natively, reducing complexity and eliminating integration points where problems typically occur.

For student involvement, VergeOS provides an accessible environment where IT and computer science students can gain hands-on experience with enterprise infrastructure. The interface is easily learnable without months of training, and the unified architecture lets students see how compute, storage, and networking interact rather than treating them as isolated domains.

The Pfeiffer University Exit Strategy

Universities are leaving VMware with a solid roadmap

Pfeiffer University in North Carolina provides a blueprint for doing this well. When CIO Ryan Conte faced VMware’s new pricing and a push for expensive hardware refreshes, he took a methodical approach. Conte evaluated public cloud providers like Azure and AWS, reduced-scope VMware deployments, and alternative on-premises platforms. Each option presented fundamental dealbreakers that made it unsuitable for Pfeiffer’s needs. Cloud providers required hiring consultants or extensive training, duplicated costs for infrastructure already owned on campus, and raised data sovereignty concerns. Scaling down VMware meant eliminating redundancy and accepting unacceptable downtime risks for critical academic systems. Traditional competitors like Nutanix demanded new hardware investments.

Pfeiffer ran a three-month proof-of-concept with VergeOS on its existing Dell and HPE servers. Three senior CIS students joined as IT assistants, making the project part of their capstone experience. The team stress-tested the platform, tried to break configurations, and learned what worked. They discovered critical lessons early, such as encrypting data at rest from the start and standardizing on 10GbE networking, and adjusted before the production migration.

Using VergeIO’s built-in migration tools, Pfeiffer moved 30 to 40 virtual machines without hiring consultants. Roughly 10% of VMs needed adjustments, all of which were resolved quickly with VergeIO support. The results speak directly to the financial pressure universities face. Pfeiffer achieved an 85% cost reduction compared to VMware, avoiding $185,575 in annual expenses. The university purchased zero new hardware and repurposed existing servers. Integrated backup and disaster recovery eliminated a separate $20,000 to $30,000 backup project. Three graduates entered IT careers with real infrastructure experience on their resumes.

“VergeIO was the only company I looked at whose product didn’t need new hardware,” Conte explained. “Others told me to buy new, but I had good servers with life left. VergeOS let me use them.”
Read the detailed Pfeiffer University Case Study here.

Universities are leaving VMware to Reuse Servers

One of the most overlooked benefits of a successful VMware exit is the cost savings from hardware economics. Most universities own capable servers that have years of useful life remaining. HPE Gen9, Gen10, Gen11, and Dell PowerEdge systems deliver strong performance if the software layer is efficient. By choosing a hardware-agnostic platform, universities eliminate capital expenses that would otherwise consume annual budgets, and instead support sustainability initiatives by reducing e-waste. Refresh cycles extend to 6 or 7 years, rather than 3 or 4. Older servers find new purpose in disaster recovery or lab environments.

At Pfeiffer, Conte repurposed older Dell servers into a DR cluster, adding NVMe via PCIe cards and SSDs for just a few hundred dollars. This level of flexibility is impossible with vendor-locked ecosystems.

Universities are leaving VMware for AI Readiness

Universities are leaving VMware because of the complexity of providing AI services to staff and students. Research analytics, adaptive learning platforms, and student-facing AI tools all require flexible, compute-ready infrastructure. Legacy virtualization platforms were not designed for these workloads. Unified infrastructure platforms like VergeOS allow dynamic GPU allocation across mixed workloads. Universities can run AI experiments on campus without cloud lock-in. Student lab environments gain access to machine learning tools. By consolidating infrastructure today, universities build the foundation for tomorrow’s intelligent campus.

A Practical Exit Roadmap

Successful VMware exits at institutions like Pfeiffer shared several characteristics. The process started with a thorough hardware inventory, workload dependency mapping, and cost baseline documentation. These institutions identified which servers had remaining useful life and which were genuinely ready for retirement. Clear goals for cost-reduction targets, uptime requirements, feature-parity needs, and timeline constraints guided the evaluation. The proof-of-concept phase tested alternative platforms on real hardware with actual workloads, not vendor demos. IT staff and students participated in the evaluation process.

Migration planning at successful institutions prioritize workloads by risk and criticality. Non-critical systems move first, providing learning opportunities before tackling production workloads. The best implementations turned technical projects into educational opportunities where students gained valuable experience and institutions built long-term internal knowledge. Documentation mattered at every stage. Runbooks, configuration guides, and lessons learned became institutional knowledge that outlasted any individual staff member.

The Path Forward

Universities are leaving VMware for reasons beyond cost avoidance. It is about reclaiming institutional control over infrastructure decisions, budgets, and operational flexibility. The two forces driving universities away from VMware — rising costs and premature hardware deprecation — are not temporary pressures. They represent a permanent shift in how VMware operates under Broadcom ownership.

Universities that successfully navigate this transition position themselves for sustainable, flexible IT operations that align with their educational mission. They avoid the trap of escalating subscription costs that consume budget meant for academic programs. They extend hardware lifecycles and redirect savings to student services. They build infrastructure ready for AI workloads and modern research demands.

VergeOS provides the platform to make this transition practical. Supporting existing hardware, unifying core infrastructure functions, and simplifying management give higher education IT teams the tools they need to modernize without breaking their budgets. The window for action narrows as license renewals approach. Institutions that act now avoid another cycle of rising costs and declining flexibility.

Filed Under: VMwareExit Tagged With: Alternative, HCI, UCI, VMware

November 4, 2025 by George Crump

Ransomware recovery versus immutability is a critical consideration for organizations seeking to protect their data and ensure business continuity amid cyber threats. Immutable backups are not the sole solution to the ransomware threat. They are storage. Valuable, necessary, but still just storage. Treating them as the solution to ransomware recovery is like saying a vault prevents theft—it doesn’t. It only protects what’s inside, and only if you manage to get something valuable into it in the first place.

Recent industry commentary has implied that immutability alone neutralizes ransomware. That’s dangerously misleading. Immutable storage is one-third of the recovery equation. It’s not a recovery strategy, and it’s certainly not resilience.

True ransomware recovery depends on three elements working in concert:

Frequent backup,
Immutable storage
Rapid, data center–wide recovery.

Miss any one of them, and you leave a gap large enough for attackers to exploit—and even if recovery eventually succeeds, it will be slow, costly, and operationally disruptive.

Frequent, Immutable Protection — Because Ransomware Doesn’t Wait for Your Schedule

Ransomware doesn’t strike politely during maintenance windows. It hits when you’re unprepared. The difference between losing a few minutes of data and losing an entire business day is measured in backup frequency.

Most IT shops still run daily or twice-daily backups—habits left over from tape systems that couldn’t do better. That schedule creates 12- to 24-hour exposure windows, during which ransomware runs free and undetected.

A financial services company experienced the ransomware recovery versus immutability firsthand during an incident. They scheduled immutable backups at midnight and noon. The attack started at 2 p.m., encrypting six hours of transaction data before detection. They flawlessly restored from the immutable backup, returning to the noon backup point, but lost six hours of verified transactions. Additionally, they faced a day of downtime while completing the full restore and manually rebuilding unprotected network and storage configuration settings. While the immutability feature proved effective, their schedule and process did not.

Modern infrastructure eliminates that trade-off. VergeOS provides infrastructure-level protection, creating immutable snapshots every hour without a performance penalty. This frequency provides a significant improvement in RPO.

The Downside of Immutable Protection

Immutability backup is essential, but it isn’t without challenges. The same protection that prevents deletion also prevents cleanup. If your storage pool runs out of space, you can’t purge old immutable backups until their retention policies expire. Keeping one long-term immutable backup makes sense for compliance, but for ongoing operations, organizations need a blend of rapid, short-lived immutable backups and read-only operational snapshots that can be rotated frequently.

Two problems emerge. First, most immutable storage systems can’t sustain frequent backups—they rely on traditional backups that must later be transferred to immutable storage, adding time, complexity, and duplication. Second, this delayed immutability undermines recovery speed and increases the exposure window by separating protection from production.

VergeOS solves both problems. It supports immutable and read-only snapshots simultaneously, enabling near-continuous protection without bottlenecks. Administrators can define short-term, immutable snapshots for ransomware defense and operational read-only snapshots for daily continuity, maintaining a balance between performance and capacity.

Immutable Protection IS Necessary

Attackers don’t just encrypt data. They steal credentials. They script the deletion of your backups before the encryption even starts.

That’s why immutable storage is essential—but only if it’s implemented correctly. Traditional backup systems depend on the integrity of credentials. Admins can delete or alter backups at will, which means attackers with admin credentials can, too. That’s not security. That’s wishful thinking.

VergeOS eliminates that dependency. Once created, an immutable snapshot cannot be deleted or modified until its retention policy expires. Not by an administrator. Not by a domain admin. Compromised credentials make no difference. The infrastructure-integrated snapshots remain untouched and serve as the foundation for full recovery.

And this is the point most “immutability solves ransomware” advocates miss: immutability that lives outside your production environment introduces risk. External immutable storage adds latency, dependency, and cost. Data has to travel across networks to reach protection, then travel back for recovery. That’s the time you don’t have when recovering from an attack.

Immutable Protection – Head-to-Head Comparison

Ransomware recovery versus immutability backup must factor in the total time to recover, not just that the data is stored in an immutable state. Recovering from an external object store requires three things before a VM is usable: the source must read and rehydrate deduplicated chunks, the network must carry the full logical data, and the all-flash target must ingest and, often, run inline deduplication. The slowest stage determines the elapsed time. A simple way to express it is:

Time = Logical bytes to restore ÷ Sustained end-to-end throughput.

On a 10 GbE path, wire rate is 10 Gbit/s = 1.25 GB/s. Real payload after protocol overhead typically lands in the 0.9–1.1 GB/s range. Using 0.9 GB/s as a realistic single-link figure, a 100 TB restore is:

100 TB ≈ 100,000 GB ÷ 0.9 GB/s ≈ 111,111 s ≈ 31 hours.

That represents the best case when the source can continuously feed the link.

In practice, a deduplicated HDD source must rehydrate chunks, which means it performs many small, random reads and index lookups. Spinning disks handle that poorly, so sustained rates often fall to 0.6 GB/s or less. At that rate, 100 TB ÷ 0.6 GB/s ≈ 166,667 s, or 46 hours. If rehydration drops further to 0.4 GB/s due to seek-bound disks or cold indexes, the same job stretches to ~69 hours. The all-flash target’s inline deduplication adds a small amount of CPU work but rarely becomes the bottleneck on a single 10 GbE stream.

With VergeOS snapshots, immutability is integrated directly into the infrastructure. There are no external targets and no data transfers. Recovery simply re-references existing deduplicated blocks and advances metadata to a known-good point. There’s no rehydration stage and no bulk restore across the network. The operation primarily involves metadata manipulation and completes in seconds, even in a 100 TB (or 100PB) environment.

Both methods provide immutable recovery points, but only VergeOS snapshots deliver operational resilience. By eliminating data movement and rehydration, VergeOS removes the slowest steps from the recovery process—turning a 31–69 hour restore into an instant return to operation.

Data Center–Wide Recovery — Because Ransomware Doesn’t Attack VMs, It Attacks Environments

Ransomware rarely stops at a single system. It moves laterally, encrypting application servers, databases, file shares, and authentication layers. Typical attacks touch dozens to hundreds of VMs across interdependent workloads. Restoring them one by one isn’t recovery—it’s triage.

Most backup tools still treat VMs as isolated entities: pick a VM, select a point in time, restore, reconfigure, and hope it connects. That works for a disk failure, not a data center compromise.

This piecemeal approach produces inconsistency. The database restores to midnight, the app server to 6 a.m., the file server to 3 a.m. They all start—but none agree. Logs reference transactions that no longer exist. Configuration files point to data that isn’t there. The environment boots but fails operationally.

A manufacturer learned that a ransomware recovery versus immutability focus can learned that moving the data back in position is only a part of the recovery effort. After restoring 140 VMs over four days following an attack they realized the environment came online but didn’t work. Database schemas didn’t match application versions. Systems pointed to the wrong shares. It took another week to reconcile data and configuration mismatches. They recovered VMs, not a business.

VergeOS avoids this through Virtual Data Centers (VDCs)—self-contained environments that encapsulate compute, storage, networking, and security policies. A VDC restores as a unit. One operation brings back the entire environment—every VM, every dependency, every policy—all synchronized to the same moment in time.

That’s not just recovery. That’s continuity.

A Final Word on “Ransomware’s Kryptonite”

Calling immutable backups ransomware’s kryptonite is like calling a safe a security system. It’s useful, but without detection, frequency, and the ability to rebuild what’s lost, it’s just a box of cold data. All immutable storage does not equal ransomware protection. Ransomware isn’t defeated by immutability—it’s defeated by recovery. Immutable storage buys you time; VergeOS gives you your business back.

Watch our Webinar on the latest version of VergeOS 26 to learn how to

Exit VMware without disruption or licensing risk
Repatriate workloads from costly public clouds
Improve cyber resiliency through integrated architecture
Prepare for AI by consolidating infrastructure into a unified platform

On-Demand Now

Filed Under: Ransomware Tagged With: Disaster Recovery, ransomware, VMware

October 28, 2025 by George Crump

Software limits infrastructure scale, not hardware. Organizations can add servers indefinitely, but if the software managing those servers introduces exponential coordination overhead, growth becomes a liability rather than an advantage. When scaling breaks, the cost isn’t just slower performance — it’s wasted hardware investment, delayed deployment, and ballooning operational overhead.

How Infrastructure Software Limits Scale

Organizations regularly encounter performance challenges when scaling traditional infrastructure beyond certain thresholds. The addition of hardware proceeds successfully—servers, networking, storage—but the expected linear performance improvement doesn’t materialize. The problem isn’t insufficient hardware. It’s architectural friction. Storage synchronization overhead, distributed routing complexity, and management coordination lag all compound as clusters grow. Resource contention increases, noisy neighbor scenarios multiply, and troubleshooting becomes more complex as failure domains expand.

This pattern repeats across the industry. Software limits infrastructure scale at predictable points—not from hardware failures, but from architectures that never anticipated modern scale requirements. Adding nodes or deploying more VMs doesn’t equal true scalability when compute, storage, and networking are managed by separate systems, each maintaining its own metadata and requiring constant coordination.

VMware and Nutanix hide architectural fragmentation behind unified management GUIs. Underneath, they still rely on multiple disconnected applications and data stores. As environments grow, this fragmentation compounds. More inter-process traffic within nodes. More synchronization overhead across clusters. More performance bottlenecks that degrade predictably with scale.

The solution isn’t another product layer, hyperconverged bundle, or management overlay. It’s a unified Infrastructure Operating System built from a single codebase—an architecture designed for scale from the ground up.

Layers Create Infrastructure Software Limits

Most vendors integrate components through APIs. This approach to software limits infrastructure scale by creating constant north-south traffic inside each node (communication between software layers) and east-west traffic across the cluster (coordination between nodes). Each module—hypervisor, storage, networking—maintains its own metadata structures. The result is inefficiency, synchronization lag, and exponential coordination overhead as clusters grow.

Legacy software limits infrastructure scale

In VMware, a single VM I/O request traverses multiple independent software layers. ESXi receives the I/O request. The request passes through vSAN APIs for storage operations. NSX handles network translation. Each hop adds CPU overhead, I/O latency, and metadata synchronization. At 10 nodes, this overhead is measurable. At 20 nodes, it’s significant. At 30 nodes, it becomes crippling.

Solving Infrastructure Software Limits: A Single Codebase

True scalability requires eliminating architectural friction before it compounds. The prerequisite for efficiency, performance, and predictability at scale is a single codebase in which all infrastructure components share the same metadata layer, scheduler, task engine, and control plane.

The difference between architectures is almost invisible at the small scale. With a few nodes, even inefficient designs appear fast. The fundamental distinction emerges when infrastructure grows to six or more nodes. At this, still relatively small node count, the number of inter-module communications multiplies exponentially.

VergeOS Eliminates Infrastructure Software Limits

VergeOS executes within one unified software context. Compute, storage, and networking operations access shared data structures and are managed through the same control plane. A VM performing storage I/O makes a direct call to shared infrastructure services without API translation or separate metadata lookups. The result is 40-60% better storage performance versus VMware with vSAN, lower resource utilization, and linear scalability without introducing coordination overhead.

This architectural difference manifests as the number of nodes per instance increases. Practically speaking, VMware vSAN clusters max out at about 64 nodes, with performance degradation starting at 32. Nutanix recommends 32-48 nodes per cluster, requiring multiple clusters for larger environments. VergeOS scales linearly to 100+ nodes in a single instance with consistent performance.

Complete Infrastructure Services in One Platform

Eliminating Enterprise AI Deployment Barriers

When a new workload or application becomes a new requirement for an organization, like AI is becoming today, Legacy software limits infrastructure scale by forcing organizations to deploy new infrastructure silos. In VergeOS, it’s just another service inside the same operating system. A true Infrastructure OS integrates virtualization, networking, storage, data protection, and AI into one platform. It is also ready to integrate the next popular workload when the time is right.

Legacy software limits infrastructure scale because of its design philosophy. VMware and Nutanix achieve functionality through stitched-together binaries. VergeOS achieves it through a unified architecture. Shared logic means no translation between modules and no management-plane silos.

In VergeOS, these services are native, not layered. Networking provides integrated routing and security without NSX-style overlays. Storage delivers global inline deduplication and instant immutable snapshots as core functions, not external components. Data protection offers immutable, near-instant recovery without copying data to secondary systems. AI provides GPU pooling, vGPU sharing, and integrated inference (VergeIQ) with the same resource management as CPU and memory—not deployed as a bolt-on Kubernetes cluster or cloud service requiring separate infrastructure.

When a VM writes data in VergeOS, that write operation deduplicates, replicates, and protects data in a single pass. In VMware, vSAN handles storage, NSX handles networking, and a separate backup product handles protection. Three separate operations with three separate metadata updates. This difference becomes more pronounced at scale.

Virtual Data Centers and Infrastructure-Wide Tagging

Virtual Data Centers (VDCs) form the architectural key to scaling tenants, departments, or workloads. Each VDC acts as a fully isolated tenant environment, including its own compute, storage, and networking—all managed from within VergeOS. VMware achieves multi-tenancy through separate clusters and NSX overlays. VergeOS achieves it natively, without extra hardware or complexity.

Legacy software limits infrastructure scale but VergeOS doesn't

VDCs are elastic, expanding resources without reconfiguration or redeployment. They are portable, allowing instant cloning, migration, or replication of entire environments. They are isolated, enforcing security and performance policies at the tenant level without separate management tools. A single VergeOS cluster can host hundreds of VDCs, each with complete tenant isolation and QoS boundaries that prevent noisy neighbor problems.

MSPs use VDCs to host customers. Enterprises use them to separate production, development, and DR environments. Cloud providers use them to differentiate service tiers. VDCs can be nested, enabling hierarchical tenant structures that mirror business organization—customer, department, team.

Infrastructure-wide tagging extends this organizational model into policy enforcement. VMware tags describe what something is. VergeOS tags define what it does. Tags apply across all layers—nodes, networks, VDCs, and storage objects. A VM tagged “Gold” can have actions taken on it, such as 15-minute immutable snapshots, replication to the DR site, a high-performance storage tier, and priority network QoS.

This becomes critical at scale. Managing 1,000 VMs manually is possible. Managing 10,000 without automation is not. Infrastructure-wide tagging makes 10,000 VMs as manageable as 100. Instead of configuring policies for thousands of VMs individually, tag 10 VDC environments.

Scale Needs Integration, Not Integration Projects

Another way legacy software limits infrastructure scale is by failing to integrate with existing automation and observability tools. Scalability depends on open integration with modern automation and observability tools, not on proprietary APIs or management stacks. VergeOS integrates natively with Terraform and Prometheus, enabling seamless integration into modern DevOps pipelines.

Terraform provides infrastructure-as-code provisioning, scaling, and lifecycle management. A single script can provision an entire multi-tenant environment—VDC creation, network configuration, VM deployment, storage policy assignment, and monitoring setup—in minutes, with full idempotency and version control. Prometheus delivers cluster-wide visibility into performance, I/O, latency, and deduplication metrics without additional agents.

VMware’s PowerCLI requires separate scripting for vSAN, NSX, and vCenter. VergeOS provides one unified API. Open integration means organizations scale operations as easily as they scale compute. Integration should expand capability, not maintenance. Terraform and Prometheus make VergeOS part of the automation ecosystem, not another island of management.

The Cost of Infrastructure Software Limits

VMware operates as independent products linked through APIs. ESXi, vSAN, NSX, and vCenter each add their own control plane and data structures. Nutanix combines AHV, AOS, Flow and Prism Central, which still operate as separate binaries under a common management GUI.

Each layer introduces multiple metadata stores and redundancy, network traffic for synchronization (east-west), and inter-process overhead within the node (north-south). As environments grow, these coordination costs rise exponentially, limiting scalability. At 50 nodes, VMware requires 50x ESXi licenses, 50x vSAN licenses, NSX licenses (if used), vCenter licenses, and a separate backup product. VergeOS requires one platform license covering all functionality.

The hidden tax of architectural complexity extends beyond licensing. Management overhead requires separate teams for compute, storage, and networking. Every additional product requires its own specialists, its own upgrade schedule, and its own failure domain. VergeOS eliminates these barriers, and performance remains consistent as nodes scale linearly.

Proving Infrastructure Software Limits Don’t Exist

Most vendors demo scalability with small clusters. Test the following scenarios across any infrastructure platform to determine whether the software limits infrastructure scale. Add 10 nodes back-to-back and measure time and performance impact. Create 1,000 VMs across the cluster and measure provisioning time. Simulate node failure and measure failover time, data protection, and data exposure windows. Run mixed workloads—database, VDI, AI inference—and measure resource contention.

VergeOS customers regularly run these tests during proof-of-concept evaluations. The results speak to architectural differences. VergeOS represents the next step in infrastructure evolution—an operating system built for scale itself.

You can scale nodes or scale architecture. Only an Infrastructure Operating System lets you do both—without compromise, without complexity, and without limits.

Don’t Settle for Infrastructure Software Limits

Legacy software limits infrastructure scale, not hardware. Software fails because of fragmented software. Fragmented software is why most infrastructure modernization projects end up with the same problems as the architecture they replace.

VergeOS solves that by collapsing all infrastructure functions into a single codebase that eliminates internal traffic, metadata duplication, and management silos. It scales infrastructure and operations — delivering the simplicity hyperscale demands.

Filed Under: Virtualization Tagged With: IT infrastructure, VMware

October 21, 2025 by George Crump

VergeOS 26 is the complete infrastructure operating system that eliminates the complexity of multi-vendor IT environments by unifying virtualization, storage, networking, data protection, and AI within a single, software-defined platform. It delivers a modern alternative to legacy infrastructure, moving organizations beyond the hypervisor swap toward complete infrastructure modernization.

What Is an Infrastructure Operating System

An Infrastructure Operating System (Infrastructure OS) is a platform that manages all core data center resources—compute, storage, networking, data protection, and now AI—under one unified management layer. Like a traditional OS manages hardware resources on a server, an Infrastructure OS manages all resources across the entire data center.

An Infrastructure OS aims to abstract hardware dependencies, eliminate integration overhead, and simplify how IT operates at scale. It consolidates what was once a set of independent products into a single, software-defined system that is easier to manage, upgrade, and secure. VergeOS 26 embodies this concept by turning infrastructure into a cohesive operating model instead of a collection of separate tools.

Infrastructure OS Requires: Private AI

Artificial intelligence is moving into the enterprise data center, but running AI workloads securely has remained challenging. VergeIQ, now fully integrated into VergeOS 26, addresses that challenge by embedding AI capabilities directly into the core of the infrastructure.

VergeIQ provides secure, shared access to large language models for inference, analysis, and conversation within the organization’s data center. It includes OpenAI-compatible services, vendor-agnostic GPU support, and dynamic orchestration that allocates GPU resources automatically. The result is an AI platform that operates beside production workloads without sacrificing performance or control.

This integration means organizations can analyze confidential data, generate insights, and automate processes without relying on external cloud services. VergeIQ brings AI into the core of infrastructure operations—where security, governance, and performance already exist.

Infrastructure OS Requires: Immutable Ransomware Protection

Ransomware remains one of the most persistent and costly challenges in IT. Attackers often compromise backup systems before encrypting production data. VergeOS 26 introduces immutable snapshots that neutralize this tactic by preventing modification or deletion of recovery points.

Immutable snapshots can only be removed through predefined retention policies. Even if credentials are compromised, recovery data remains untouched. IT teams can combine immutable and standard snapshots to protect critical applications, regulated workloads, and compliance data while maintaining operational flexibility.

VergeOS 26 eliminates the need for separate backup software or external repositories by embedding immutability directly into the storage layer. Snapshots are captured instantly and restored in seconds, transforming data protection from a peripheral process into a core infrastructure function.

Infrastructure OS Requires: A Modernized User Experience

VergeOS 26 delivers a redesigned management interface focused on clarity, speed, and automation. Administrators can complete tasks such as provisioning virtual machines or configuring networks in fewer steps, reducing operational effort across teams.

Resource tagging enables IT teams to categorize assets by function, department, or project, thereby applying consistent governance policies. Tags can be used for far more than virtual machines. Administrators can tag entire Virtual Data Centers (VDCs), networks, storage volumes, and even snapshots, giving them precise control and context across all resources. For example, a VDC supporting production workloads can be tagged for higher performance and stricter retention policies. At the same time, a development VDC can be assigned a shorter snapshot schedule and reduced capacity limits. This approach improves visibility across large-scale environments, simplifies compliance tracking, and enforces policy consistency without relying on manual classification or external reporting tools.

The new alarming system integrates directly with ServiceNow, Slack, and Microsoft Teams through webhooks. Operations teams can now automate real-time notifications and responses to events, creating a more proactive model for infrastructure management.

Unified Platform. Unified Outcome.

Every feature in VergeOS 26 supports a unified approach that solves the infrastructure modernization problem. Compute, storage, networking, and AI all operate under the same management plane. This architecture eliminates the inefficiencies of managing multiple systems and provides predictable performance and scalability across all workloads.

Immutable snapshots strengthen protection. VergeIQ extends the platform’s capability into enterprise AI. The modern UI and tagging framework streamline day-to-day administration. Together, these advancements create an environment that is easier to manage, more secure, and ready for the next generation of applications.

Modernize Infrastructure, Don’t Just Swap Hypervisors

Replacing VMware is no longer enough. VergeOS 26 enables enterprises to modernize their infrastructure completely, rather than just shifting hypervisors. It replaces the layers of complexity that have accumulated over time with a single, coherent system designed for flexibility and resilience.

VergeOS 26 simplifies daily operations for IT teams and reduces dependence on multiple vendors. For business leaders, it lowers the total cost of ownership and accelerates time to value. For developers and data scientists, it provides access to AI-ready resources under the same policies and controls as the rest of the environment.

This release defines modernization today. VergeOS 26 scales, protects, and supports AI workloads without rebuilding infrastructure from scratch. It delivers the stability of a mature platform with the agility required for what’s next.

See VergeOS 26 in action. Join the live webinar on October 30 at 1:00 PM ET to experience the platform that defines modern infrastructure.

Filed Under: Virtualization

October 21, 2025 by George Crump

Complete Infrastructure Modernization with Private AI with VergeIQ, Immutable Ransomware Protection

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — October 21, 2025 — VergeIO, creator of the industry’s only Ultraconverged Infrastructure (UCI) platform, today announced VergeOS 26, enabling enterprises to deploy AI infrastructure without cloud dependencies, strengthen ransomware defenses with immutable data protection, and consolidate legacy architectures into a single software platform that replaces VMware, SAN storage, and complex networking stacks.

Most enterprises today manage five or more separate infrastructure platforms, resulting in unnecessary complexity and increased risk. VergeOS 26 consolidates these functions into a single software-defined platform, abstracting infrastructure services from hardware while delivering capabilities that legacy vendors cannot match.

VergeIQ: Enterprise AI Integrated into Infrastructure

VergeOS 26 introduces VergeIQ, providing organizations with secure, shared access to large language models (LLMs) for inference, analysis, and conversation—entirely within their own data centers. Integrated directly into VergeOS, VergeIQ includes OpenAI-compatible services, vendor-agnostic GPU support, and generative AI intelligence. Teams gain enterprise-wide access to AI while maintaining control over data, context, and compliance.

“VergeIQ lets IT deliver secure, policy-controlled AI without exposing corporate data to public clouds,” said Greg Campbell, Chief Technology Officer at VergeIO. “It runs inference beside production workloads, giving enterprises a practical, safe way to use AI every day.”

Organizations in healthcare, finance, and government can now analyze sensitive data, accelerate research, and automate workflows using AI models that remain within their own infrastructure. VergeIQ delivers immediate value without requiring specialized AI teams or lengthy implementation cycles.

Ransomware-Proof Data Protection

VergeOS 26 introduces immutable snapshots that cannot be altered or deleted except through predefined retention policies, preventing ransomware from destroying recovery points. Even if administrative credentials are compromised, recovery data remains intact. IT teams can mix immutable and standard snapshots to protect critical systems with iron-clad immutability while maintaining flexibility for routine workloads.

Extending VergeOS Leadership as the VMware Alternative

VergeOS 26 strengthens its position as the unified, software-defined VMware alternative, adding new capabilities that improve usability, resilience, and automation.

Modernized User Experience

Redesigned user interface with streamlined navigation and workflows that reduce administrative time.
Simplified operations that accelerate adoption across IT teams.

Enhanced Operations and Control

Resource tagging for organization, policy enforcement, and cost tracking across departments and tenants.
Revamped alarming with webhook integration for ServiceNow, Slack, and Microsoft Teams, enabling automated response workflows.

“The VMware alternative conversation has moved beyond licensing costs to architectural superiority,” said Marc Staimer, President of Dragon Slayer Consulting. “VergeOS proves you can consolidate virtualization, storage, and networking into one stack—and add capabilities like private AI that legacy vendors can’t deliver without duct tape and partnerships.”

Availability

VergeOS 26 will be available for download after the live webinar on October 30th at 1:00 PM ET and immediately to all customers through automatic updates.

About VergeIO

VergeIO delivers the industry’s first Ultraconverged Infrastructure (UCI) platform, combining virtualization, storage, networking, and AI into a single software stack. By replacing complex multi-vendor architectures with one operating environment, VergeOS simplifies management, lowers costs, and modernizes data centers. VergeIO moves organizations beyond hypervisor replacement—driving complete infrastructure modernization for the AI-ready enterprise.

Media Contact:
Judy Smith, JPR
Email: [email protected]
Phone: 818-522-9673

Filed Under: Press Release

October 16, 2025 by George Crump

When IT planners opt for infrastructure modernization instead of a hypervisor swap, it significantly impacts their VMware alternative ROI analysis. Most organizations planning their VMware exit calculate ROI based on a single variable: the cost difference between VMware licensing and an alternative hypervisor. That narrow view captures only a fraction of the potential return. The real ROI question is not which hypervisor costs less, but whether the migration redesigns how infrastructure protects, manages, and scales workloads.

A hypervisor swap—moving from VMware to KVM, for example—reduces licensing expenses but leaves the rest of the stack untouched. Backup servers, replication appliances, storage arrays, and network overlays remain in place. The fragmented model also leaves organizations unprepared for the AI initiatives that every organization will face. Running AI workloads on the existing stack means adding another infrastructure layer with its own storage, virtualization, and management tools.

An infrastructure modernization approach consolidates protection, storage, networking, and compute into a single operating environment, supporting both traditional workloads and AI without the need for separate infrastructure. The ROI comparison between these two paths reveals a significant difference.

The Hypervisor Swap: Limited Gains, Persistent Complexity

Replacing VMware ESXi with KVM or another alternative, targets only one layer of the infrastructure stack. Licensing costs drop—sometimes dramatically—but everything else stays the same. This is the critical limitation: the migration solves the immediate licensing problem but preserves the fragmented architecture that made VMware expensive in the first place. Swapping hypervisors leads to a disappointing VMware alternative ROI analysis.

Backup systems continue to operate as a separate infrastructure. Replication tools move data between sites using their own appliances. DR orchestration coordinates recovery across multiple products, each with its own policies. The same teams manage the same disconnected systems, just with a different hypervisor underneath. Recovery workflows remain manual. Testing stays disruptive. Complexity persists.

For a mid-sized deployment running 500 VMs, hypervisor licensing drops by $200,000 to $400,000 annually. The reduction is measurable and immediate. It also accounts for only 10 to 15 percent of the total infrastructure expenditure. The remaining 85 to 90 percent—backup software, replication licenses, storage arrays, and operational labor—remains unchanged. A hypervisor swap improves the licensing line item but does not modernize the architecture.

Infrastructure Modernization: The Data Protection Payoff

An infrastructure modernization approach integrates protection, storage, networking, and compute into a single operating environment. Backup servers are eliminated. Replication appliances are removed. Storage arrays are consolidated. The migration presents an opportunity to redesign the entire stack, rather than just one layer. The result is that the VMware alternative ROI analysis now extends value across the entire infrastructure.

For the same 500 VM deployment, hypervisor licensing drops by $200,000 to $400,000 annually. Eliminating the dependence on backup software and replication licenses adds another $150,000 to $300,000 in annual savings. Dedicated backup storage—often consuming 30 to 40 percent of total storage spend—recovers another $100,000 to $200,000 per year. DR orchestration tools contribute another $50,000 to $100,000. The combined savings range from $500,000 to $1,000,000 annually. VergeIO case studies show multiple customers saving more than one million dollars per year by taking the infrastructure-wide modernization approach.

Management consolidates from four or five separate tools into a single interface. Backup schedules, replication policies, and DR workflows are automated inside the same platform that runs workloads. Recovery testing moves from disruptive annual events to continuous validation. The first-time success rate for DR increases because there are no assembly steps to fail. This integrated approach to data protection transforms recovery from a reconstruction exercise into an automated response. The result is additional ROI while improving DR Readiness.

Beyond Protection: The Full Infrastructure Modernization

Data protection and resiliency represent the most apparent areas for savings in an infrastructure modernization. The elimination of backup software, replication appliances, and dedicated backup storage delivers immediate and measurable returns. VMware’s protection problem stems from its reliance on fragmented third-party tools that operate independently. These savings are only the beginning.

Network modernization adds another layer of cost reduction. Traditional VMware environments rely on intelligent switches, which come with expensive port licensing and vendor-specific features. An integrated infrastructure abstracts networking into software, allowing organizations to deploy commodity switches without intelligence at the edge. The cost difference is substantial: a 48-port intelligent switch costs $15,000 to $25,000, compared to $2,000 to $4,000 for a commodity equivalent. For an environment with 20 switches, network hardware costs decrease significantly, from $300,000 to $400,000, to $40,000 to $80,000, resulting in an annual savings of $260,000 to $320,000 when amortized over a typical refresh cycle.

Storage consolidation delivers even larger returns. External storage arrays carry acquisition costs, maintenance contracts, and dedicated management overhead. Array-based storage for 500 VMs typically requires $400,000 to $600,000 in initial investment, with annual maintenance consuming 20 to 25 percent of that total. An integrated platform eliminates the array, using local storage across nodes with software-defined protection and performance. The hardware cost drops by 70 to 80 percent. Maintenance costs disappear. The combined savings reach $300,000 to $500,000 annually.

AI integration represents the next frontier of cost avoidance. Organizations building separate AI infrastructure face the same fragmentation that made VMware expensive: dedicated GPU clusters, isolated storage pools, separate networking, and disconnected management. An integrated platform, on the other hand, runs AI workloads alongside production applications, sharing the same storage, networking, and protection infrastructure. The cost of deploying AI decreases significantly when transitioning from building a parallel stack to adding GPU resources to an existing environment. For organizations planning AI initiatives, this difference determines whether Private AI is financially viable or prohibitively expensive.

Infrastructure Modernization: Three-Year Financial Impact

The financial difference becomes clear when projected over three years. A hypervisor swap from VMware to KVM saves $650,000 over three years. The protection stack continues to consume $700,000 to $900,000 annually.

An infrastructure modernization saves $1,650,000 over the same period. Infrastructure modernization delivers 2.5 times the financial return of a hypervisor swap. The gap widens when operational labor is included. Managing four or five separate systems requires more staff time than managing a single integrated platform. That labor difference adds another $100,000 to $200,000 in annual savings.

Infrastructure Modernization Delivers Operational ROI

Financial savings are measurable, but operational improvements matter just as much. A hypervisor swap alone, reduces licensing costs but does not change how the infrastructure operates. Backup windows remain scheduled events. Replication lags by hours or days. DR testing disrupts production. The operational model remains unchanged, which means the problems persist.

Infrastructure modernization fundamentally changes the operational model. Protection becomes continuous rather than scheduled. Snapshots are created automatically, deduplicated inline, and retained for months or years without impacting capacity. Replication synchronizes data, configuration, and metadata together. DR testing occurs during production hours without posing a risk.

Recovery times drop from hours to minutes. Integrated platforms stream only the blocks needed for active operation, allowing VMs to continue running during recovery. Failover and failback become automated processes. Recovery stops being a coordination exercise and becomes an automated response.

IT teams stop hoping that their DR plan works and start knowing it does. Recovery testing shifts from an annual stress event to a routine validation. The operational burden of managing fragmented systems disappears. Staff can focus on projects that drive business value rather than maintaining protection infrastructure.

The Virtual Data Center Advantage

The ROI difference becomes even sharper when virtual data centers enter the picture. A hypervisor swap alone, operates at the VM level. Each virtual machine is migrated, validated, and protected individually. The granularity creates management overhead and introduces points of failure.

Infrastructure modernization operates at the data center level. A virtual data center encapsulates compute, storage, networking, and configuration into a single portable unit. It can be replicated, cloned, or moved as one object. When a site fails, the virtual data center activates elsewhere in minutes, preserving IP addresses, access controls, and internal relationships. Recovery becomes relocation rather than reconstruction.

Traditional DR requires duplicate infrastructure at a secondary site that sits idle waiting for failure to occur. A virtual data center allows those resources to participate in production, serving as overflow capacity, test environments, or development labs. The secondary site contributes value every day rather than waiting for a disaster. The investment in DR infrastructure stops being purely insurance and instead becomes active capacity.

Choosing: Infrastructure Modernization or Hypervisor Swap

If you are building a VMware alternative ROI analysis, the decision between a hypervisor swap alone, and infrastructure modernization comes down to scope and ambition. A hypervisor swap solves the immediate licensing problem but leaves the rest of the stack unchanged. Teams continue to manage separate systems, coordinate recovery workflows, and test DR plans that depend on manual intervention. The financial savings are modest. The operational model stays fragmented.

Infrastructure modernization solves the licensing problem and eliminates the fragmentation, complexity, and cost of adjacent protection systems. Management consolidates, recovery becomes automated, and DR shifts from defensive planning to continuous operation. The financial savings are three times larger. The operational improvements are transformative.

Organizations choosing a hypervisor swap alone, gain 10 to 15 percent in cost savings over three years. They migrate workloads to a cheaper hypervisor while keeping everything else unchanged. Organizations that choose infrastructure modernization can achieve 30 to 40 percent in cost savings over three years. They eliminate both the hypervisor tax and the protection tax simultaneously. The architecture is rebuilt from the ground up.

The VMware Exit forces this choice. The question is not whether to migrate, but whether to modernize. A simple hypervisor swap treats the symptom. Infrastructure modernization corrects the architecture. The ROI difference is measurable, the operational difference is immediate, and the strategic difference determines what the next decade of infrastructure looks like.

Want some help? We can help you build a VMware alternative ROI analysis with our VMware Exit Assessment. The assessment we offer is a real thing. We assess your environment to understand what you have, and then develop a migration strategy. We build a model that shows you where you’ll save money in phases—most people aren’t going to do all the things we can do on day one. We’ll discuss the first step and how to proceed. We need about 30 minutes to get started, schedule a session here.

Filed Under: VMwareExit