George Crump

by

developing a VMware exit plan

The recent acquisition of VMware by Broadcom and the cold reality of this week’s layoffs make developing a VMware exit plan the new top priority for IT professionals. However, transitioning to a new virtualization platform can be a daunting task. With careful planning and execution and working with vendors with a long track record of helping organizations make this transition, the risks of conversion can be minimized.

A VMware Exit Migration Plan

Below is a quick overview of how to migrate from VMware to an alternative virtualization platform. For a more detailed plan, please download our definitive guide to exiting VMware, “A Step-By-Step VMware Migration Process.”

  1. Evaluate Alternatives: The first step in developing a VMware exit plan is to research the business and technological aspects of potential alternatives. Consider licensing models. Does the vendor’s practice of charging by CPU, core, or storage capacity punish you for using advanced hardware? Also, make sure you have at least feature parity in terms of performance, data protection, and resilience. Read our article “Comparing VMware to VergeOS,” to learn how VergeOS compares to VMware.
  2. Cost-Benefit Analysis: Undertake a thorough analysis of costs versus benefits, including licensing, maintenance, operational costs, and potential savings. Explore the potential to eliminate other software applications like backup, replication, and ransomware recovery. At a minimum, you should be looking for a 50% savings on licensing, decreasing the need for future hardware purchases and simplifying operations. Read our article “VMware Alternative Cost-Benefit Analysis,” to learn how VergeOS can reduce infrastructure costs now and in the future.
  3. Plan the Migration: Another imporant aspect of developing a VMware exit plan is creating a detailed migration plan encompassing timelines, resources, risk management, and stakeholder involvement. You are busy. Is the vendor willing to provide assistance and manage the migration for you? To watch a migration in real-time, watch our on-demand webinar.
  4. Prepare the Infrastructure: Ensure hardware and networking compatibility with the new software. Does the vendor have a strict hardware compatibility list that will force you to buy new hardware instead of leveraging your current investment? VergeOS doesn’t require new hardware, or even a restrictive hardware compatability list (HCL). Instead, we have a modest set of minimum requirements.
  5. Conduct Training: Training the IT staff on the new software and updating operational documentation is also a key step in developing a VMware exit plan. How long will it take to learn the new software and be comfortable performing day-to-day operations? Want to see how easy it is to learn VergeOS? Register for a virtual self-guided test drive.
  6. Test Migration Process: Start with a pilot migration and monitor performance. Can you migrate everything and keep the migrated virtual machines (VM) in sync as you start a pilot test of a few VMs? Continuously updating migration targets enables you to expand the test environment as you verify compatibility.
  7. Test Failure Scenarios: An often overlooked part of developing a VMware exit plan is making sure, as part of the testing, you test failure conditions, including failed network connections, servers, and storage media. Can the alternative self-heal? Does it provide adequate, built-in, data protection and recovery capabilities?
  8. Full-Scale Migration: A full-scale migration shouldn’t be necessary if the alternative can continually update migrated VMs from the VMware environment. Migration should be gradual and risk-free, testing one step at a time.
  9. Post-Migration Testing: Post-migration testing should also be unnecessary if the solution enables the gradual migration process as described in steps 6 and 7. You will want to confirm functionality and performance under full load in the new environment. A more efficient alternative should free up resources and enable you to cancel your next hardware refresh.
  10. Transition Support and Maintenance: Establish new support arrangements and maintenance procedures. Make sure the vendor is able to provide 24/7 support and allows for human-to-human communication.
  11. Decommission Old Environment: Decommission VMware and cancel any related licenses or contracts. The moment you’ve been waiting for, lower those licensing costs and free yourself from the acquisition chaos. You should save 50% or more on licensing and increase your total return on investment (ROI) by as much as 80% thanks to more efficient resource utilization.
  12. Review and Optimize: Conduct a post-migration review and continually monitor for optimization opportunities. A robust infrastructure solution should eliminate the need for most of the VMware ecosystem. Gradually replace these components to further improve ROI.
  13. Document and Communicate Changes: The final piece of developing a VMware exit plan is to update all documentation and inform impacted parties. Users should see no change in day-to-day, except for performance improvements and better data protection.

Conclusion

developing a VMware exit plan

The acquisition of VMware by Broadcom and the resulting organizational changes have brought to the forefront the necessity for IT professionals to develop a comprehensive VMware exit plan. Transitioning to a new virtualization platform can be streamlined with planning, analysis, and collaboration with experienced vendors.

The outlined steps, ranging from evaluating alternatives to documenting and communicating changes, provide a structured pathway for a smooth transition. By leveraging platforms like VergeOS, organizations can look forward to significant cost savings, enhanced performance, and simplified operations. Remember, the ultimate goal is not just to replace VMware, but to elevate your organization’s virtualization capabilities to a new level of efficiency and effectiveness.

Free, Personalized VMware Migration Strategy

Schedule a 15-minute call with one of our experts so we can capture the information we need to create a free, customized VMware Exit plan for your organization.

You’ll get a professional report detailing a customized process by which you can exit VMware. It will also provide a cost-benefit analysis showing how much you can reduce upfront and long-term data center costs by exiting VMware.

Do you think the ensuing chaos of Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware is overrated? Check out this article.

Filed Under: VMwareExit Tagged With: ,

by

a VMware alternative cost-benefit analysis

One of the more critical steps when exiting VMware is performing a VMware alternative cost-benefit analysis. Every VMware alternative should have a lower license cost, but they should also have additional benefits that lower the total cost of ownership upfront and in the future. You can download our step-by-step guide to a risk-free VMware migration here.

VMware Cost-Benefit Analysis – The Cost of Inefficiency

Licensing is at the heart of a VMware alternative cost-benefit analysis. Today, VMware charges by the number of CPUs; if your CPU has more than 32 cores, you’ll need multiple licenses per CPU. It is widely assumed that VMware licensing will shift to a per-core subscription model after the Broadcom acquisition.

a VMware alternative cost-benefit analysis

By charging extra for high-core count CPUs or per core, VMware penalizes you for investing in Intel’s next-generation CPU, which can reduce data center footprint and cooling costs. As a result, many customers will purposely select less capable servers to keep VMware licensing costs in check.


Most VMware alternatives don’t fare much better in terms of licensing. While they may be less expensive than VMware, they also tend to charge per physical CPU, core, or the amount of RAM. Others charge by storage capacity because they are really storage software, not an alternative infrastructure software solution.

Another component of VMware alternative cost-benefit analysis is the cost of server replacement. VMware, especially in the latest release, is requiring decommissioning of servers that are less than five years old, forcing server refreshes before the server has reached the end of its life. There is a cost associated with VMware’s lack of efficient server utilization. Some organizations have bare-metal workloads that they don’t feel confident virtualizing because of the overhead of the VMware hypervisor. Many organizations, because of VMware’s inefficient code base, can’t stack as many virtual machines (VM) per ESXi host as they would like.

Once again, most VMware alternatives don’t fare much better. While many are KVM-based, they haven’t done the optimization work required to operate smoothly. In most cases, these solutions have tried to hide KVM’s complexity behind a pretty GUI; they’ve actually done little optimization of KVM itself, if any. These VMWare alternatives suffer from similar performance inefficiencies and can’t help customers virtualize bare metal workloads or increase VM densities.

The other challenge with most VMware alternatives is that they require that you buy new hardware, either from them directly or from a “certified vendor.” In either case, you can’t leverage the hardware you already have, which is unfortunate because, with an efficient infrastructure software solution, customers can get years of additional life expectancy from their existing servers.

VergeOS Savings Go Beyond Licensing

VergeOS licenses are about 30% to 60% less expensive than the VMware offering. It is licensed by the physical server, not the number of CPUs, cores, amount of RAM, or storage capacity. A VMware alternative cost-benefit analysis must be about more than licensing costs. VergeOS, because it is Ultraconverged Infrastructure (UCI), includes a full complement of virtualization, networking, and storage capabilities in a single unified code base highly optimized for performance and scale.

The efficiency of the UCI architecture enables customers to increase VM density and virtualize formerly bare-metal workloads while using existing hardware. VergeIO is a pure software company; we don’t sell hardware, have a certified vendor list, or even have a hardware compatibility list (HCL). Instead, we have a modest set of minimum requirements. Most customers use their existing servers, freeing up compute resources by 35% to 40% while still seeing performance improvements. As a result, they can delay the next round of server purchases, which increases the potential cost savings to 75% or more.

When the time does come to invest in new server hardware, the VergeIO licensing model empowers customers to invest in multi-processor, massive core-count servers with as much storage capacity as they want. Investing in more powerful servers means more VMs per host, a reduction in data center footprint, and a reduction in power and cooling costs.

VMware Cost-Benefit Analysis – Storage

One of the great mysteries of the data center is “Why does storage cost so much?” The storage cost was one of the top concerns expressed by VMware Customers in our recent survey (licensing was number one). You can access all of the report details here. As a result, storage is a key component of a VMware alternative cost-benefit analysis. Dedicated storage arrays are 10X to 20X the cost per TB of server-based capacity. They also require a separate management process and often a separate team to manage them.

a VMware alternative cost-benefit analysis

Simple math indicates that this should not be the case. A 15.3TB NVMe Flash Drive is less than $1,500, meaning it should cost about $30,000 for 300TBs of high-performance flash storage capable of delivering hundreds of thousands of IOPS, but the cost of a dedicated storage array is many times that.

Vendors will tell you that it is so you can enjoy data services like deduplication, drive failure protection, snapshots, and data replication. But these services, as they offer them, are also full of compromise and raise the cost of the physical hardware required to deliver the performance and capacity the organization needs.

For example, the deduplication algorithm many storage solutions use requires significant processing power and RAM. Advanced RAID algorithms like Erasure Coding are complex to implement in a scale-out design and also suffer from slow drive recovery times. Most snapshot technologies are limited to the number that can be active and depend on each other, making them ill-suited for backup, disaster recovery, and ransomware protection.

The shortcomings of data services only add to the cost of a typical storage system and do not provide the full potential of any of its alleged, costly capabilities.

Hyperconverged infrastructure was supposed to resolve the issues creating high storage costs but has fallen woefully short. These solutions are not much less expensive than dedicated storage arrays and require more performance compromises. They suffer from the overhead associated with data services, and customers must overcompensate by investing in additional processing power, RAM, and storage performance/capacity.

Most VMware alternatives don’t invest much development time in optimizing the storage software. In most cases, they use ZFS or something similar. The problem is that these storage solutions aren’t optimized for running in a virtual environment, and as such, don’t deliver the performance or data services that customers need. They also suffer from the same, and in some cases, worse overhead than the HCI solutions mentioned above.

VergeOS Lowers Storage Costs Without Compromises

VergeOS’ Ultraconverged Infrastructure approach means that storage and networking execute as equal citizens to the hypervisor. As a result, VergeOS delivers high-performance, efficient capacity utilization thanks to global inline deduplication and enterprise-class data services that don’t impact performance. VergeOS’ storage services enable you to use server-class SSDs and HDDs without compromise.

Eliminating the additional cost associated with dedicated storage arrays or HCI storage can move your infrastructure savings to 75% or more. For example, we recently worked with a customer who purchased a 30TB Dell/EMC AFA system for $60k. With VergeOS, they could purchase 600TBs of capacity for that $60K and expect significantly better performance. That’s 20X the capacity for the same purchase price. Using the optimized VergeOS environment, all reads are serviced by locally attached NVMe SSDs. Instead of going across a storage network, data is read directly from the NVMe interface.

The storage components within the VergeOS code provide complete data services. Its global inline deduplication delivers an average 5:1 or better data efficiencies without requiring massive processing power or RAM capacities. Our IOclone powered snapshots behave more like complete clones, but thanks to global inline deduplication, they take milliseconds to create, are space efficient, and don’t impact performance. Each snapshot is independent. Snapshots taken before it or even the primary dataset itself can be removed, and their removal won’t impact the current snapshot.

The independence of VergeOS snapshots makes them viable backup copies. Combined with WAN-aware replication, most customers find the data protection capabilities within VergeOS to be superior to the capabilities of their current backup software. While most customers will initially leverage VergeOS’ capability to support third-party backup solutions, many customers eventually let their backup software license expire and decommission their backup storage, confidently relying solely on VergeOS, increasing the cost savings to 85% or more.

Conclusion: A New Horizon in Cost-Effective Virtualization

In conclusion, a VMware alternative cost-benefit analysis shows that VergeOS makes a compelling case for organizations seeking to optimize their virtualization strategies. Traditional VMware environments come with significant costs and limitations, especially concerning licensing, server utilization, and storage expenses. These constraints strain budgets and hinder operational efficiency and technological advancement.

Most VMware alternatives are built from open-source software without much additional development investment besides a GUI. The limitations of unoptimized hypervisor software, virtualization ignorant storage software, and limited networking capabilities make any potential cost savings irrelevant. These solutions follow the same tired licensing models of VMware, charging by processor, core, amount of RAM, or storage capacity. Further, they require the purchase of new hardware.

Alternatives like VergeOS offer a refreshing contrast, addressing key pain points in licensing, server utilization, and storage management. With its single unified code base, the Ultraconverged Infrastructure (UCI) model of VergeOS presents a more cost-effective and performance-optimized solution. Its licensing structure, focused on the physical server rather than individual components, provides substantial cost savings. At the same time, the ability to increase VM density and leverage existing hardware further enhances its value proposition.

Storage costs, often a significant concern in data centers, are notably reduced with VergeOS. VergeOS eliminates the need for dedicated storage arrays or complex HCI solutions by integrating storage and networking as equal components alongside the hypervisor. Its innovative approach to data services, including global inline deduplication and efficient snapshot management, ensures high performance without the usual compromises.

VergeOS stands out as a viable and highly beneficial alternative for organizations looking to move away from VMware’s costly and restrictive model. By embracing this new horizon in virtualization, businesses can expect immediate cost reductions and long-term operational efficiencies, laying a solid foundation for future growth and technological innovation.

Filed Under: VMwareExit Tagged With: , ,

by

strategizing a step-by-step VMware exit

Once IT professionals identify a VMware alternative, the next phase is to develop a step-by-step VMware exit strategy. We talk with VMware customers multiple times a day, and they want to take advantage of VergeOS’ performance, ransomware resiliency, and, of course, 70%+ cost savings, but the next question is always, “Where do I start?”

The good news is there are a lot of ways to start your journey to VergeOS:

  • Put new workloads on VergeOS
  • Use VergeOS for remote offices or Edge locations
  • SAN Replacement
  • HCI Replacement

A Methodical Risk-Free VMware Exit

In this article, we will take you through the process of converting from VMware to VergeOS, even if none of the above use cases apply right now. Instead, we will assume your primary motivation is:

  • Lowering VMware costs
  • Extending the life of existing hardware
  • Improving ransomware resiliency

We will also respect that VMware is infrastructure, and unwinding it from your data center is a process. You’ll also notice that each of these steps provides cost savings along the way as you head to the eventual goal of replacing VMware for the ultimate cost reduction.

VMware Exit Step 1 – Use VergeOS for Backup/DR

Creating a step-by-step VMware exit strategy starts with making sure you have good backups. What if you could not just have a backup but also improve your recoverability? VergeOS’ migration capability leverages the VMware backup API and can back up your virtual machines (VM) regularly to a relatively basic VergeOS instance. We use Change Block Tracking (CBT) to keep the VMs up to date while using minimal network bandwidth. Starting with Backup/DR provides a very affordable extra layer of protection for your VMware environment.

a step-by-step VMware exit starts with DR

You don’t have to turn off what you are currently using for data protection and disaster recovery (DR). Still, many customers find this method a more viable recovery mechanism since all the components for a complete recovery are now converged into a few servers. If a server in your VMware cluster or if your storage array fails, you can, within minutes, have the impacted VMs running in the VergeOS instance.

The hardware requirements for this insurance DR are minimal. You need two or three servers and some internal storage for those servers with enough capacity to protect your virtual machines. In most cases, customers, because of VergeOS’ efficiency, can use servers that they already have on hand, further reducing costs. You’ll need a small flash tier for VergeOS, and then you can send backups to either flash or hard disk drives.

Make All-Flash DR Affordable

Ideally, you want your DR target to be as fast as production because that DR target might someday be production! In the era of all-flash, that means a flash-based DR solution, which makes production-class recovery very expensive.

Because VergeOS uses internal server storage and built-in data deduplication, you can now afford to use flash-based drives, even for backup and DR. For example, 15.3TB NVMe SSDs are less than $1,500 off the shelf. Insert a set of these into your servers, and you have hundreds of terabytes of high-performance flash capacity.

Remember VergeOS charges by the physical server; there is no additional charge for the type of drive technology used or capacity required. The advantage is not just faster backups; in the event of a disaster, your VMs can instantiate on the VergeOS instance at better-than-production performance. VergeOS also supports hard disk drives (HDD), so older backups or less critical VMs can be directed there.

Our DR functionality, IOprotect, is built into VergeOS at no additional charge. The advantage of using VergeOS for backup and DR as a first step is that your investment in the software can start paying dividends within days of purchase.

VMware Exit Step 2 – NAS Replacement

a step-by-step VMware exit continues with NAS replacement

Part of a step-by-step VMware exit strategy might be using VergeOS as a Network Attached Storage (NAS) replacement for file services. You can add more capacity to the existing servers you are using in step one, or you can add one or two more. Again, the drives you add can be flash or HDD, depending on the data you will serve through our file services. Once again, everything is deduplicated, so capacity utilization is very efficient. File data is the most susceptible to ransomware, and moving it to VergeOS means that all of this data benefits from our IOfortify solution. Ransomware is an infrastructure problem.

NAS vendors charge a premium for their solutions, and if you primarily use those systems for file services, you are paying too much. Eliminating an existing NAS or at least not paying a premium to add capacity can dramatically reduce expenditures.

VMware Exit Step 3 – Testing

Again, VMware and VergeOS are infrastructure software. You will want to test your workloads to ensure they work perfectly within VergeOS. You should find no issues; in many cases, you’ll see a performance improvement, but testing is an expected requirement.

The good news is that if you follow step one, you are ready to start step three. Go to your backed-up VMs and import the first set of VMs that you want to test. You do not have to import everything at once, so start as small as you are comfortable. All the VMs, including the VMware versions of the VMs you are converting to VergeOS, will continue to be backed up by VergeOS. Within moments, the selected VMs will be available within the VM console; start them up and begin your testing. You can test them for a long time to ensure you’ve covered all the bases.

VMware Exit Step 4 – Conversion

The next step in a step-by-step VMware exit strategy is conversion. Again, you don’t need to convert all the VMs at once. Some customers will convert low-priority workloads first, then wait for a compelling event to convert the rest. Meanwhile, those VMware VMs continue to be protected by VergeOS.

a step-by-step VMware exit makes the final conversion safe and risk-free.

The compelling event may be one of the use cases mentioned earlier. New workloads are an obvious item to initiate on VergeOS instead of VMware. Remote offices and Edge locations are also a great place to start. If there is infrastructure (servers, network switches, internal storage) at the remote location, VergeOS can leverage it. These smaller locations can convert quickly, and customers can enjoy the benefits immediately.

Another compelling event may be a resource issue. You may have workloads that need more processing power, access to GPUs (we virtualize those), or the most common resource shortage, storage capacity. Implementing more resources within VergeOS is always less expensive than building your current infrastructure. We provided a real-world example of this in our blog “Exiting VMware to Eliminate High Storage Costs.”

The Final Step – VMware Elimination

The final and most compelling event is when your VMware license comes up for renewal. With other solutions, this could be a scary all-or-nothing proposition. With VergeOS and following the above steps, you are not throwing a switch and saying a prayer. The migration is completely de-risked, and when you get that jaw-dropping renewal notice from VMware, you probably already have most of your environment running on VergeOS. All that is left to do is cancel the contract and figure out what to do with the extra money you now have in your IT budget.

See It For Yourself

We go through these steps and show a complete VMware migration demonstration in our on-demand webinar to learn more about our risk-free VMware Exit strategy and see a VMware Migration in action.

Or schedule a 25-minute technical whiteboard session, and we will sketch the whole process out for you.

Filed Under: VMwareExit

by

Exiting VMware to Eliminate High Storage Costs

Storage, an integral part of a VMware infrastructure, often consumes a hefty chunk of the IT budget, and exiting VMware to eliminate high storage costs may be the best strategy. Exiting VMware can reduce primary storage costs and investments in secondary storage like backup and archive. A VMware alternative can provide better ransomware resiliency and data protection, reducing backup software investments.

Most IT professionals think that high storage costs come from being forced to invest in high-performance dedicated all-flash arrays (AFA). VMware’s vSAN and Nutanix’s hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) products were supposed to lower storage costs by enabling IT to use off-the-shelf storage media while maintaining enterprise-class features, performance, and availability. Both products fell well short of the goal and, in most cases, are as expensive as the legacy three-tier architecture.

Why Does VMware Have High Storage Costs?

So, what should storage realistically cost? A 15.3 TB NVMe SSD is priced at less than $1,500, meaning 300 TB of high-performance storage comes in at about $30,000.

Why, then, is it well over 5X to 10X that amount to add 300TB of flash capacity to a VMware environment? Dedicated arrays have to cover the cost of the components already in the environment (CPU power, networking, memory). HCI hasn’t lived up to expectations, either. These vendors still charge too much for their software, which doesn’t deliver the enterprise-class performance or capabilities that IT demands, so IT must overcompensate with more hardware and additional drives.

Decoding the High Storage Costs

The above mentioned, $30,000 should be the entire cost to add 300TBs of high-performance storage. Most customers have plenty of excess storage bays in their physical hosts, so they should be able to add these twenty drives without additional hardware costs.

If HCI vendors offered common sense licensing, there would be no additional software charge. The problem is that vSAN and Nutanix don’t have common sense licensing; they constantly charge for add-ons. From a technical perspective, they can’t easily handle adding a mixture of different storage device types to existing servers; they can’t deliver the hundreds of thousands of IOPS potential of the storage, and these solutions often lack the enterprise features that customers expect.

The combination of the failure of HCI to cut costs and the subsequent need for a high-end all-flash array (AFA), balloon the VMware storage budget. The cost of dedicated storage is negatively impacted by:

  1. Markup Pricing: Despite some genuine costs involved in their strategy, dedicated storage array vendors charge exorbitantly for their capacity.
  2. Performance Requirements: Their software inefficiencies necessitate powerful processors to maintain the array’s pace with the performance potential of the media they insert into it.
  3. Feature Implementation: Functions such as deduplication, snapshots, and data protection, while beneficial, are also inefficient and strain performance, demanding even more RAM and processing power.
  4. Unnecessary Server Expenses: Often, organizations have servers with empty drive bays. Despite this, they purchase and maintain separate powerful “storage servers,” incurring extra costs.

The High Cost of Data Protection

Exiting VMware to eliminate high storage costs may also allow you to reduce the high cost of protecting VMware. Because of the inefficiencies in the HCI and dedicated storage array software, customers must also invest heavily in backup and recovery architectures, which include the backup software itself, a backup storage target, and a long-term object storage-based system to immutably store backup data so that it is protected from a ransomware attack.

Ironically, all of the investment in backup infrastructure has done little to stem the tide of ransomware. According to a recent VergeIO survey and study:

  1. It takes most customers 3+ weeks to recover from a ransomware attack
  2. It takes most customers 3+ days to realize they are under attack.

If the infrastructure can’t warn you it is under attack and takes days to realize it is happening, then almost every snapshot contains encrypted data, as do most backups. Pulling the correct data out of these backup copies is manual and time-consuming, which is why most recovery efforts take more than three weeks.

VergeIO’s Ultra-Converged Infrastructure: Eliminating High Storage Costs

VergeIO introduced VergeOS, an ultra-converged infrastructure solution to address the high storage costs dilemma. Boasting a unified, efficient code base, VergeOS promises:

Exiting VMware to Eliminate High Storage Costs
  1. Cost Efficiency: Customers can install server-class media like 15.3TB SSDs in their existing servers for a fraction of typical HCI / dedicated array costs while gaining over 300TB of storage capacity.
  2. Enhanced Performance: With these drives, users can potentially achieve over a million IOPS with improved data protection.
  3. Deduplication: Integrated into its core, VergeOS’s global inline deduplication incurs minimal CPU or RAM overhead.
  4. Snapshot Technology: Powered by IOclone technology, VergeIO’s snapshots act more like data clones, making them a viable backup solution. Add to that, IOfortify, and you have infrastructure-wide ransomware protection.
  5. Virtual Data Centers: VergeIO’s unique Virtual Data Center (VDC) technology encapsulates the entire data center and simplifies tasks like patching, disaster recovery, and ransomware resiliency.

The Verdict: Should You Turn Off Your Array?

For those using HCI, the benefits of VergeOS – from superior performance to reduced costs – make the switch compelling. VergeOS installs on the existing HCI hardware, breathing new life into it while improving performance, data protection, and ransomware resiliency. VergeIO features common sense licensing. VergeOS is licensed per physical host, not the number of processors, cores, RAM, or storage capacity. One license per physical server, and it includes all of the capabilities.

Even dedicated storage array customers will find it more cost-effective to change when weighing the high maintenance costs against VergeOS’s offerings. Most AFA customers tell us they can switch to VergeOS for considerably less than the cost of their current maintenance contract. Combine that with the cost savings of exiting VMware; these customers typically report a 50% reduction in TCO. As one customer said, “I’ll save money just by turning my AFA off.”

In conclusion, making informed decisions is crucial as the IT landscape evolves and storage costs skyrocket. Exiting VMware and considering alternatives like VergeOS can extend the savings beyond the VMware license. Many customers find their storage cost savings justify the migration while paving the way for enhanced performance and greater data resiliency.

Exiting VMware to eliminate high storage costs is one of many reasons to consider a VMware alternative, but you need to take a step-by-step approach. Join us for our webinar, “How to Exit VMware Step-by-Step,” for practical advice on how to develop a VMware exit strategy at a pace that makes sense for your organization.

Filed Under: Storage Tagged With: ,

by

Ransomware has emerged as a dominant threat to global businesses, but are backups enough for ransomware recovery? The most recent VergeIO study, “Top Concerns of VMware Customers,” showed that 25% of respondents faced a ransomware attack in the past year. Notably, every one of these victims had recently fortified their backup infrastructure, but the average time to recover from an attack was still over three weeks.

Backups: The Existing Safety Net Has Holes

Most organizations count on backup systems as a primary defense line, and every data protection vendor suggests that customers increase their spending on backup and recovery infrastructure. Even primary storage and infrastructure vendors like VMware are establishing relationships with data protection vendors to cover gaps in their product’s ransomware resiliency capabilities.

Despite all this, the VergeIO survey results, showing an average three-week recovery time suggest that this investment is for naught. Where is data protection falling short?

  1. Data Transfer Delays: Transferring data from backup to production storage is tedious and lengthens recovery periods.
  2. Lag in Ransomware Detection: Often, a user’s inability to access systems, not IT discovery, signals an attack, resulting in a three-day average detection time.
  3. Encrypted Backups: Delayed detection allows ransomware to compromise snapshots and backup copies, necessitating a manual, multi-phased recovery strategy.

Why is Backup Ransomware Recovery So Slow?

There are a lot of reasons why recovery from ransomware takes so long. Partly, it is the fundamental issue with backup data. When you need to recover from any event, be it drive failure, a site disaster, or ransomware, you must physically copy or move data from a backup storage device to a production storage device. The more data, the longer recovery takes.

The Detection Problem

are backups enough for ransomware recovery
Wondering What’s Going On?

Again, VergeIO’s survey revealed that detection is a significant challenge that negatively impacts data recovery during a cyber attack. The survey found that, on average, it takes organizations three days to realize they are under attack. Moreover, the attack notification method is unreliable, as it often relies on users calling IT and reporting that they cannot log into their system. This notification time lag highlights the need for organizations to find solutions that can better detect and notify IT of an attack. It seems unlikely that rapid detection can come from backup software.

The Impact of Slow Detection

If it takes three days to discover that ransomware encrypts files in your environment, it dramatically impacts recovery time. First, in most cases, because of poorly implemented snapshot technology, all snapshot data will contain encrypted data. Three-day detection also means that the backups, which are next in line, also have intermixed encrypted data.

While recovery from backup is likely possible, the backup copies need to be manually examined to understand what data on them has been encrypted and what data has not. The result is these customers had to do an “interleaved” recovery, which means IT is restoring some data from some backups and other data from other backups. This manual interleaved recovery is why it took the average customer over three weeks to recover data after the ransomware attack. 

Key Requirements for Rapid Ransomware Recovery

Identification Critical for Ransomware Recovery

To recover quickly from a ransomware attack, the first and most crucial step is to get notified about the attack as soon as possible. This will enable you to isolate the protected copies and shut down the network to prevent the attack from spreading. It also reduces the infiltration of the attack into backup copies.

Zero Data Movement Ransomware Recovery

The second requirement is to have more frequent backups of your data, which should be immutable and easily accessible. This way, you can move the copies into production without data movement, which can help you recover from the attack more efficiently. Most backup software solutions require you to copy data to a separate storage system for backup and then to even another for immutability.

VergeOS – Infrastructure-Wide Ransomware Recovery

The VDC Foundation

To quickly recover from ransomware attacks with minimal, if any, data loss, it’s crucial to have a strong foundation. Our VergeOS solution uses Virtual Data Center (VDC) technology to provide this foundation. A VDC encapsulates an entire data center, much like a virtual machine (VM) encapsulates a physical server. Each VDC contains all the VMs, networking, and storage settings required for its workload or group.

VDCs can be easily moved, making them ideal for disaster recovery and specifically for ransomware recovery. For best results, IT departments should create multiple VDCs within their physical data center, each dedicated to a specific application, line of business, division, or customer.

Once the VDCs are created, a read-write copy of VergeOS is injected into each VDC from a read-only core copy. This protects the operating environment from any attack. In the unlikely event of an attack on the VergeOS instance within the VDC, customers can refresh it, and the read-only core will inject a new, clean copy of the OS into the VDC, thereby eliminating any contamination.

Moreover, VDCs provide additional value in the more common case of an attack at the application or file system level. Each VDC is an independent “walled garden”, making it nearly impossible for any malware to spread between virtual data centers. Lastly, VDCs make it easy for IT to test patching, as entire VDCs can be cloned in milliseconds.

VDC cloning enables IT to create a “lab” version of each VDC and apply patches to them first. IT can ensure that the patches work and don’t conflict before applying them to the production VDC. As we discuss in our article, “Ransomware Counts on Patch Tuesday,” applying patches quickly and securely is a critical aspect of a ransomware recovery plan.

Rapid Detection and Response

The VergeOS ransomware recovery capabilities enable customers to recover from an attack quickly with minimal data loss. First, VergeOS provides rapid detection using its IOfortify technology. Because VergeOS’s file system is built using a blockchain-like technology, it can quickly identify encrypted data. IOfortify, by monitoring unexpected spikes in new data creation, can pinpoint potential ransomware breaches in just 10 to 15 minutes.

are backups enough for ransomware recovery? No You need advanced detection.

Next, VergeOS’s IOclone-powered snapshots are inline deduplicated copies that can be created within milliseconds, multiple times per hour. These clone-like snapshots don’t impact performance no matter how many there are or how frequently they are taken. Most importantly, they are also immutable, meaning malware can’t change them. These snapshots can also be replicated cost-effectively to a disaster recovery site, fulfilling the 3-2-1 rule of backup.

Once IOfortify notifies IT of an attack, they can resort to the most recent snapshot, which, while protected, likely has a copy of the undetonated malware file. However, VergeOS can mount those snapshots in a quarantined state and provide information as to which VMs were causing IOfortify’s anomaly detection to trigger. IT merely needs to scan the quarantined snapshot and remove the malware.

After cleaning, this minutes-old snapshot can be promoted to production, and without data movement, the customer is back in operation. The production copy can either be deleted, ensuring the complete elimination of the ransomware attack, or quarantined so that IT can study it further to understand how the attack got into the environment and spread. To learn more about developing a ransomware recovery strategy, download our white paper, “Creating an Infrastructure-Wide Ransomware Resiliency Strategy.”

Conclusion

Ransomware attacks have become a formidable challenge for global businesses. Attacks like the recent MGM incident, which took ten days, underscore the need for rapid recovery. Are backups enough for ransomware recovery? No, while backup infrastructure remains a line of defense, the disturbing three-week average recovery time underscores its limitations.

By employing a multi-pronged approach that includes rapid detection using blockchain-esque technologies, immutable IOclone-powered snapshots, and virtual data center encapsulation, VergeOS aims to reduce the vulnerabilities in the ransomware recovery process. As organizations continue improving their ransomware recovery capabilities, they must consider a more comprehensive, infrastructure-wide approach. VergeOS is the way forward by ensuring swift recovery and minimal data loss in the face of ransomware threats.

Filed Under: Blog, Ransomware

by

the impact of VMware's inefficiency

Licensing costs contribute to VMware’s total costs, but IT professionals almost always underestimate the impact of VMware’s inefficiency. They listed licensing costs as their primary concern in our recent survey. Still, other concerns, like required premature server and storage upgrades, lack of virtual machine density, and continual investments in backup infrastructure, highlight its inefficiency.

VMware’s inefficiency is brought on by years of plugging holes in the product through a never-ending series of bolt-on fixes, which often increases licensing costs and requires more hardware than necessary and more IT professionals to manage an increasingly complex environment. Even if VMware were to freeze its prices or even lower them, the ripple impact of its inefficiency makes a VMware exit to a more efficient alternative platform a wise strategy.

Understanding the Layers of Data Center Infrastructure

Most vendors divide the data center infrastructure into three layers. A hypervisor like VMware ESXi virtualizes the compute layer. A storage layer that in most medium to large-sized data centers is a dedicated storage array because of the shortcomings of virtualized storage products like VMware’s vSAN, and a networking layer that is built using proprietary networking hardware because of the expense of software-defined networking solutions like VMware’s NSX.

While it isn’t forgotten about, there is a fourth layer that is, for some reason, not included in the typical infrastructure discussion: backup and disaster recovery. In theory, with the right hypervisor software and storage capabilities, there should be no need for this to be a separate layer. Still, because of shortcomings, most organizations invest a large part of the IT budget into it.

The Impact of VMware’s Inefficient HCI

VMware started as a server virtualization and consolidation solution. Before VMware, each application ran on a dedicated server. VMware made it so IT could safely run multiple applications on a single server as virtual machines (VM). The idea behind hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is to extend that concept and eliminate the need for dedicated storage arrays and network appliances by moving the software that drives these dedicated appliances onto the same set of servers that VMware was using.

the impact of VMware's inefficiency

In the same way that VMware lowered costs by eliminating the need for a server for every application, HCI should lower costs by eliminating the need for a dedicated set of appliances for every aspect of storage and networking. The impact of VMware’s inefficiency means that most data centers have chosen not to use HCI and instead continue to use a legacy three-tier architecture. The problem is that most HCI vendors continue to use ESXi and run their storage or networking software as a virtual machine under ESXi, meaning they must navigate through the same VMware tax overhead as virtualized applications.

The result is HCI has not achieved the price advantages nor the operational simplicity that the original entrants into the market claimed. As a result, the legacy three-tier infrastructure is still the most common architecture in data centers.

HCI’s Inefficient Networking Problem

HCI also has an east-west inter-node network issue since storage and network operations must coordinate separately across all the cluster servers. Since each of these services is separate from the hypervisor, it triples the amount of inter-node communication, which limits scalability.

Because of the impact of VMware’s inefficiency, HCI networking limitations go beyond east-west traffic issues. In most cases, HCI vendors offer almost no additional network functionality besides what is embedded into the hypervisor. Or, in the case of VMware’s NSX, which is reasonably robust, it is not included as part of the hypervisor, and the add-on cost significantly increases the VMware license cost. In a recent blog, VMware suggested the best way to overcome its ransomware vulnerabilities was to deploy NSX, which, not coincidentally, almost triples the cost of the license.

VergeOS Eliminates the Layers

VergeIO is Ultraconverged Infrastructure; instead of re-creating the data center layers in software, VergeOS unifies them, including secure data protection, into a single code base that dramatically increases efficiency. Its efficiency lowers costs, enabling IT to do more with its existing resources while simplifying operations. Most customers can reduce physical server demand by 30% or more, which means running existing servers longer and ordering new servers less frequently.

VergeOS provides complete Layer 2 and Layer 3 network functionality, eliminating the concerns over east-west traffic contention and the need for separate network appliances. It also eases administration as network management becomes a seamless part of the data center infrastructure.

The Impact of VMware’s Inefficient Storage

Most HCI vendors are storage vendors in disguise. They make a storage software solution that can run as a VM within a hypervisor, typically VMware. These solutions, including vSAN, suffer from performance issues, partly because of vendors’ VMware performance tax and odd development choices.

Like HCI in general, storage, specifically in this architecture, should deliver rather significant cost savings and deliver better performance with the right architecture design. IT should be able to add capacity to their existing servers for a fraction of the cost of a “shelf upgrade” using a dedicated storage array. However, the impact of VMware’s inefficiency is felt most severely when HCI tries to provide storage performance and services comparable to a dedicated storage array.

In the survey above, we spoke to a customer looking to add about 300TBs of storage to their three-year-old All-Flash Array. HCI, if it had an efficient storage capability, should eliminate the AFA from consideration because the customer had several servers with twelve or more available storage expansion bays.

A 15.36TB NVMe SSD can be easily had for about $1,500. That means the customer can get 300TB of raw NVMe capacity, delivering well over one million IOPS for about $30,000, and insert them into the empty drive bays in their existing servers. When asked what it would cost to add 300TB of raw capacity to their Pure Storage array, they said at least 10X that cost.

As you can see, storage should be the area where HCI enjoys a significant price advantage, but again, like in other areas, it falls short:

  1. Since most HCI vendors are storage vendors, charging by the amount of capacity in use, the cost to add storage to HCI quickly rivals that of dedicated storage arrays.
  2. Most HCI solutions can’t add storage to available drive bays on just a few servers in the HCI instance. The capacity must be added to all the servers, or the customer must buy additional servers that match those in place.
  3. HCI inefficiencies mean the solutions can’t reach anything close to the performance potential of NVMe flash drives.
  4. Using storage services like deduplication, data protection, and snapshot retention times, further impacts storage and compute performance.

As an example of how storage services impact HCI’s efficiency, look no further than deduplication. While most HCI solutions support deduplication for capacity efficiency, in most cases, it is a bolt-on solution and not part of the original code base. VMware vSAN, for example, added deduplication years after it first appeared on the market. Nutanix’s deduplication appeared almost a decade after the product first shipped.

As a result, using deduplication from these vendors typically requires the addition of more powerful processors, additional memory, and, in some cases, changes to data protection strategies.

Limitations and compromises are the impact of implementing almost any storage feature as part of a virtualized environment:

  • Snapshots are limited to 32 total, and the best practice is not to have a snapshot that is older than a few days.
  • Data protection from media failure is complex and takes an undue toll on inter-node connectivity.
  • Replication for disaster recovery almost always requires a separate product.

VergeOS Supercharges HCI Storage Performance

Storage services are built into VergeOS and run as an equal citizen to the hypervisor instead of a subservient VM. Storage capacity can be inserted into nodes “post-facto” or storage-mostly nodes (a couple of processors and storage) can be added to the existing instance.

VergeOS provides a complete suite of storage services like deduplication, replication, and unlimited snapshots that can act as backups because they are more like clones, than traditional snapshot technology. Because storage is an equal citizen in VergeOS, our storage software is equally efficient and overcomes the challenges IT faces with VMware’s inefficient approach to storage. All these services can run without impacting performance, limiting their use, or forcing IT to make compromises elsewhere.

It is essential to highlight the VergeIO common sense licensing model. VergeOS is licensed by the physical server, not the number of processors, cores, amount of RAM, or storage capacity. In the above example, the customer can add 300TB of capacity with zero additional licensing charge.

The Impact of VMware’s Inefficient Data Protection

VMware also provides a very inefficient means of data protection, forcing all customers to create a separate backup and disaster recovery infrastructure. While it has basic protection from media failure and the ability, at an extra cost, to migrate VMs if a physical server fails, its snapshot capabilities are anemic at best. And their own best practices state, “Do not use VMware snapshots as backups.” For the most part, VMware’s snapshots are only used one at a time to provide data to a backup application and then quickly removed for fear of negative performance impact.

As a result, most customers implement separate backup software, which sends data to a separate backup storage area, which then must send it to another immutable backup storage area to protect against ransomware. These customers typically have a separate disaster recovery (DR) solution replicating data to a DR site. VMware’s inability to adequately protect itself is the cause of all of this additional investment in data protection.

The backup and recovery infrastructure becomes a separate cost and management point, often requiring specialized IT personnel. However, this additional investment does more than add to the total cost of VMware’s inefficiency. It complicates other tasks, such as patch upgrades.

For example, in our survey, we spoke to a VMware customer using HPE Zerto as a more powerful disaster recovery tool because of concerns about VMware’s ransomware vulnerabilities. There is an obvious cost concern with Zerto, but this customer’s current experience highlights a concern with the bolt-on approach caused by VMware’s inefficient approach to data protection.

In this case, the customer had a critical patch from VMware that closed a vulnerability in ESXi to a known ransomware exploit. However, they found that Zerto was not yet compatible with this latest release of VMware, and it would be at least three months before they were. The use of bolt-on technologies forces the customer into an awkward position. Do they deploy the VMware update and go without disaster recovery for three months, or do they keep disaster recovery working but put the organization at risk for a known ransomware exploit? While this situation does not increase the customer’s hard cost, the impact of VMware’s inefficiency certainly increases their mental overhead and anguish.

VergeOS is Secure and Resilient

Unlike VMware’s inefficient ransomware protection, VergeOS was built from the start to be a secure infrastructure software. The OS itself is hardened against attack. When combined with virtual data centers, immutable snapshots, and rapid alerting of encryption activity, customers can bounce back from ransomware threats in minutes with no data loss.

Conclusion

While licensing costs are a valid concern, the total cost of VMware’s inefficiency goes well beyond the surface. Inefficient HCI, storage, and data protection layers contribute significantly to operational complexity and expenses. VergeIO’s innovative approach with VergeOS offers a comprehensive solution that eliminates these inefficiencies, reducing costs, and simplifying operations. As data centers evolve, it’s essential to consider alternatives that optimize efficiency and empower IT professionals to do more with existing resources.

To learn more about how VergeOS can revolutionize your data center, watch our on-demand webinar as we discuss the results of our survey of almost 200 VMware customers and provide a live demonstration of VergeOS recovering from a ransomware attack.

Filed Under: VMwareExit Tagged With: , ,