George Crump

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35–40% cost savings, simplified migration from VMware, and scalable multi-tenancy strengthen Livewire Cloud’s value to MSPs

Ann Arbor, Michigan – April 22, 2025 — Livewire, a cloud service provider focused exclusively on enabling Managed Service Providers (MSPs), has selected VergeOS from VergeIO as its alternate virtualization solution for those not wishing to upgrade to new VMware licensing. VergeOS is a private cloud environment tailored to the operational needs of its MSP partners.

As a cloud service provider (CSP) purpose-built to serve MSPs, Livewire chose VergeIO because it offers an integrated platform that combines virtualization, storage, and networking into a single software-defined codebase. This consolidation removes the complexity and unpredictability of VMware’s multi-product architecture—particularly relevant after the Broadcom acquisition, which introduced new licensing models, contract structures, and provider uncertainty.

“Our goal wasn’t just to cut costs—it was to future-proof our cloud offering for the MSP channel,” said Cliff Greenberg – CEO, of Livewire. “VergeOS gives us a platform that is operationally simpler, financially sustainable, and far more aligned with the needs of today’s service providers.”

Livewire began evaluating alternatives as the VMware exit trend accelerated across the service provider ecosystem. Many of its MSP partners struggled with escalating VMware licensing fees, complex upgrade dependencies, and hardware constraints—making it challenging to scale profitably or meet client expectations.

VergeOS offered Livewire a smooth transition path with native migration tooling, an intuitive interface familiar to VMware users, and compatibility with existing infrastructure. VergeIO’s support ecosystem was critical in the transition, providing guided proof-of-concept deployments, hands-on migration services, and 24×7 engineering assistance.

“We were able to deploy VergeOS alongside our VMware environment and migrate tenants gradually—on our timeline and without disruption,” said Greenberg. “The VergeIO team worked closely with us at every step.”

The shift to VergeOS allows Livewire to consolidate infrastructure and simplify operations across its entire cloud footprint. Key benefits include:

  • 35–40% reduction in infrastructure costs
    By transitioning to VergeOS’ flat, per-server licensing model, Livewire eliminated costly VMware per-core and add-on product fees. The integrated storage and networking capabilities also removed the need for vSAN, NSX, and external RAID systems. This reduced hardware requirements, power consumption, and management overhead, creating immediate and recurring cost savings across the environment.
  • Integrated, policy-driven multi-tenancy with VDC isolation
    VergeOS enables Livewire to provision fully isolated Virtual Data Centers (VDCs) for each MSP tenant, complete with dedicated virtual networking, compute, and storage resources. Role-based access control and nested VDC capabilities allow Livewire to delegate administration securely while enforcing strict resource boundaries and performance tiers—all without separate clusters or hardware silos.
  • Built-in support for tiered storage, GPU workloads, disaster recovery, and VDI
    VergeOS natively supports multiple storage tiers and live workload migration between them, allowing Livewire to serve both high-performance and archival needs from a unified platform. Native GPU passthrough enables AI, rendering, and graphical workloads. Built-in snapshot-based replication supports near-instant disaster recovery across VergeOS environments.
  • Support for automation tools like Terraform and Ansible
    VergeOS exposes a RESTful API and Terraform provider modules, enabling infrastructure-as-code deployment of VDCs, virtual machines, and network configurations. Livewire also uses Ansible for automated patching, template-based provisioning, and environment updates—significantly reducing manual intervention and accelerating tenant onboarding and scaling.
  • Visibility and monitoring through Grafana integration
    VergeOS publishes detailed performance, capacity, and resource utilization metrics via Prometheus-compatible endpoints. Livewire integrates these into Grafana dashboards for real-time infrastructure and tenant health visibility, enabling proactive alerting, SLA enforcement, and capacity planning. “CSPs like Livewire are at the heart of VergeIO’s mission,” said Yan Ness, CEO of VergeIO. “We built VergeOS to deliver the efficiency and flexibility required to serve multiple tenants securely—without stacking on cost or complexity. Livewire’s success shows what’s possible when providers are empowered with the right tools.”

Livewire continues to expand its VergeOS-powered footprint while reinforcing its commitment to helping MSPs scale efficiently. Through its fully managed deployment and 24×7 support services, Livewire enables partners to adopt VergeOS confidently, avoiding the pitfalls of hyperscale lock-in or legacy virtualization bloat.

This announcement highlights VergeOS as a powerful VMware alternative for service providers optimized for multi-tenant cloud infrastructure and turnkey service delivery.

For more information on the VergeIO/Livewire VMware alternative for MSPs.

Check out https://www.verge.io/livewire/

About Livewire

Livewire is a Cloud Service Provider for MSPs that powers infrastructure for MSPs nationwide. Focusing on removing friction and maximizing profitability for its partners, Livewire offers a complete, MSP-centric private cloud designed to support modern workloads and service delivery at scale.

About VergeIO

VergeIO is the leading VMware alternative. The company provides a software-defined data center operating system that consolidates virtualization, storage, and networking into a unified platform. VergeOS dramatically reduces complexity and cost while delivering the performance and multi-tenancy of modern IT environments. Organizations worldwide rely on VergeOS to simplify infrastructure and future-proof their operations.

Media Contact
Judy Smith
JPR Communications
[email protected]
818-522-9673

Filed Under: Press Release

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A world without VMware is the bare metal dilemma. This service provider variant delivers dedicated physical servers—without virtualization layers—giving customers complete control over hardware resources, performance, and isolation, with on-demand availability for as long or as short as needed. These organizations have long struggled to balance performance and flexibility against cost control. Their customers demand the raw power of dedicated physical servers—but increasingly want the agility and convenience of virtual infrastructure layered on top. Many bare metal service providers (BMSP) relied on VMware for years to provide that virtualization layer, but times have changed.

State of the Bare Metal Service Provider

With escalating licensing costs, hardware lock-in, and support delays—especially after VMware’s acquisition by Broadcom—many BMSPs are rethinking their foundation. Customers themselves are exploring alternatives to VMware and frequently rely on their bare metal service providers for guidance and recommendations. Providers are therefore looking for a new platform not just to keep their own margins healthy and streamline operations but also to recommend a viable VMware alternative to their customers confidently. That’s where VergeOS comes in.

Bare Metal Challenge #1: Per-Core Licensing Penalizes Modern Hardware

BMSPs run high-density infrastructure to deliver better performance per watt and reduce space, power, and cooling costs. However, VMware’s per-core licensing structure punishes that efficiency. A dual-socket server with 64 cores? That’s a premium license fee—even if you use a fraction of those cores for each customer. The bare metal dilemma is whether they allow VMware licensing practices to adjust their hardware buying strategies or just pay the VMware tax.

VergeOS solves this with flat, per-server licensing. You pay the same regardless of how many cores you have. That means you can finally take full advantage of modern, high-core-count servers without being penalized at the software level. This is a differentiator for providers looking to do more with less hardware.

“With VMware, we constantly compromised on hardware to manage licensing costs. Now, with VergeOS, we buy the servers that make sense for our business, not for VMware’s licensing model.” — Jeff Hinkle, CEO of NETdepot

Bare Metal Challenge #2: Infrastructure Fragmentation Increases Complexity

VMware environments require separate components for virtualization (ESXi), storage (vSAN), and networking (NSX), each with its own licensing, support contracts, and management overhead. Add vCenter for management, and you’ll have a sprawling control plane to deliver basic services.

VergeOS unifies virtualization, storage, and networking into a single software platform. There is no need for external SANs, third-party firewalls, or expensive software-defined networking tools. It simplifies everything for BMSPs who want to reduce their management overhead and deploy faster.

“VergeOS allowed us to eliminate VMware licensing, Microsoft SQL Server licensing, and external storage arrays, dramatically simplifying operations.” — Kelley Allen, CEO, CCSI

Bare Metal Challenge #3: Hardware Compatibility Requirements Limit Flexibility

BMSPs pride themselves on being able to run a wide variety of server configurations to meet different performance tiers and customer needs. However, VMware’s restrictive Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) puts artificial limits on what you can deploy and what you can intermix. The bare metal dilemma is whether to risk repurposing older servers still functioning or having to continuously refresh with new hardware.

VergeOS runs on almost any x86 hardware. It’s designed to be lightweight and flexible, allowing you to repurpose existing hardware or test newer form factors without fear of breaking support or violating license terms. For providers looking to extend hardware lifecycles or reduce CapEx, that’s a huge win. Plus, with VergeIO’s advanced availability capabilities, BMSPs can run this older hardware configuration without risking customer outages.

Bare Metal Challenge #4: Support That Feels Like a Ticket Queue

In a 24/7 provider environment, waiting hours for a support engineer is not acceptable. Many BMSPs report increasing delays in VMware’s support responsiveness as their environment grows more complex. The bare metal dilemma is whether to build internal expertise, which is expensive, or find a product that is easier to support.

VergeIO delivers high-touch, fast-turnaround support. In customer reports, VergeIO support teams often respond to emails in under five minutes and spin up Zoom sessions within fifteen. That’s the partner BMSPs need when uptime and SLAs are on the line.

“VergeIO provides the best vendor technical support I’ve ever experienced in the industry. They helped us solve issues quickly and thoroughly, making our VMware transition seamless and secure.” — Yogi Yeager, President, BEAR Technologies

Bare Metal Challenge #5: Maintaining Isolation and Simplicity

BMSPs sometimes become Cloud Service Providers (CSPs), serving multiple customers on shared hardware. Without proper isolation, noisy neighbors, security breaches, or compliance violations are a risk. But many traditional stacks weren’t built with multi-tenant isolation in mind.

Solving the The Bare Metal Dilemma

VergeOS supports isolated Virtual Data Centers (VDCs) for each customer—even on shared physical hosts. Each VDC has virtual networking, storage, compute, and management controls. This allows BMSPs to offer secure, flexible, and self-managed tenant environments without deploying new hardware for each customer.

Bare Metal Challenge #6: Automation and Observability are Essential

Modern BMSPs must operate at scale without scaling their staff. That means automation and observability aren’t optional—they’re essential.

Solving the The Bare Metal Dilemma

VergeOS integrates seamlessly with industry-standard tools like Terraform, Ansible, and Grafana. BMSPs can use Terraform to deploy new tenant environments as code, Ansible to manage updates and patching workflows, and Grafana dashboards powered by ioMetrics to monitor real-time infrastructure health.

This allows providers to:

  • Provision and scale customer workloads programmatically
  • Standardize deployments across environments
  • Reduce configuration drift and human error
  • Visualize usage, forecast capacity, and detect anomalies early

Join VergeIO for a live webinar, during which we will demonstrate how our Terraform provider and ioMetrics can take your infrastructure to the next level.

Bare Metal Challenge #7: Ensuring a Fast, Reliable VMware Migration

Providers and their customers want minimal disruption and risk when transitioning from VMware.

Solving The Bare Metal Dilemma

VergeIO’s ioMigrate provides rapid, low-risk migrations. It connects directly to VMware via the backup API, enabling a near-instant initial migration and thorough testing under VergeOS. Incremental updates from the production VMware environment are continuously synced to VergeOS during testing. When testing is complete, the final update and cutover typically take less than one minute, minimizing customer downtime and disruption.

Bare Metal Challenge #8: Protecting Against Ransomware

Ransomware is a top concern for BMSPs because a single customer’s compromised environment can rapidly impact others. The bare metal dilemma is whether they build another stack of software to adequately protect their environment or look for infrastructure that can defend itself.

Solving The Bare Metal Dilemma

VergeOS mitigates ransomware risks through comprehensive isolation provided by VDCs, enabling each tenant to be completely isolated from the others. ioClone provides read-only snapshots that can be taken every few minutes without impacting performance. These snapshots are unlimited and don’t impact system resources. ioFortify complements this by offering early notifications of ransomware attacks, detecting suspicious activity within minutes, and enabling rapid recovery.

The Financial Impact: Real-World Savings

Providers making the switch to VergeOS consistently report significant cost savings:

  • NETdepot: Approximately 80% reduction in infrastructure software costs due to VergeOS’s flat licensing model and dense server utilization.
  • CCSI: Significant reductions in licensing and infrastructure costs, reducing per-desktop expenses dramatically by eliminating VMware, Microsoft SQL Server, and external storage licensing.

“We’ve lowered our cost per virtual desktop dramatically.” — Kelley Allen, CEO, CCSI

The Bottom Line

The bare metal dilemma is how to address their unique requirements when considering a VMware alternative while dealing with mounting pressure from customers who want the performance of metal and the convenience of virtualization without the complexity or cost. VMware once helped bridge that gap, but it’s no longer aligned with provider economics.

VergeOS is purpose-built to empower BMSPs. It delivers a unified, cost-efficient, and flexible platform that simplifies operations and unlocks profitability. Whether transitioning off VMware or designing a new infrastructure stack from scratch, VergeOS gives you the foundation to compete—and win—in a rapidly changing market.

ioMetrics is now available on GitHub Releases, complete with full documentation and setup instructions.

Ready to experience VergeOS firsthand?
Join our hands-on lab to see VergeOS in action and explore how easy your transition from VMware could be.
Sign up for the hands-on lab now.

Filed Under: MSP Tagged With: , , , ,

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Why Your Infrastructure Must Be More Reliable Than a Laptop

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) promises centralized management, enhanced security, and simplified desktop provisioning, but ensuring VDI resilience ultimately determines its success. Users expect their virtual desktops to be available whenever needed, and IT administrators can’t afford downtime. The last thing an IT team wants to hear is that a user’s personal laptop is more reliable than the VDI environment!

📺 Want to see how a resilient VDI infrastructure works in the real world? Watch our on-demand webinar featuring VergeIO, Inuvika, and Kelley Allen from CCSI demonstrating the solution in his production environment.
Register here.

To prevent this, organizations must deploy a highly resilient VDI architecture that can withstand hardware failures, ensure uninterrupted access, and protect against data loss. While solving performance issues like boot storms is essential, its potential performance doesn’t matter if the infrastructure is down. Ensuring VDI Resilience means choosing an infrastructure that can handle node failures, multiple simultaneous drive failures, and even full-site disruptions without impacting end-user availability.

The Cost of Downtime in VDI

When a user’s local laptop fails, one user is down. However, if a VDI system fails, hundreds or thousands of users can be left without access to their desktops and applications, bringing productivity to a standstill.

Downtime in a VDI environment results in:

  • Lost productivity – Employees, students, or healthcare professionals can’t access their critical applications.
  • IT scrambling to recover – Administrators are forced into emergency troubleshooting and system restores.
  • Potential data loss – Critical work may be lost if desktops or application servers aren’t adequately protected.
  • User frustration and resistance – If VDI is unreliable, users may abandon it in favor of personal devices, undermining IT security and control.

To prevent these issues, a truly resilient VDI platform must deliver continuous availability and data protection.

The Challenges Ensuring VDI Resilience

Traditional virtualization platforms often rely on RAID-based storage protection and compute clustering to maintain uptime. While these methods provide some level of redundancy, they have critical weaknesses:

  • RAID can’t handle multiple simultaneous drive failures – If two or more drives fail simultaneously in a RAID 5 or RAID 6 array, data loss occurs, leading to a time-consuming and costly recovery process.
  • Compute clustering requires rebalancing workloads – In a node failure, traditional clusters must migrate VDI sessions to remaining nodes, often causing performance degradation or session disconnects.
  • Long rebuild times and performance loss – If a RAID array or vSAN-based storage system loses a drive, the rebuild process can take hours or even days, significantly slowing performance during that time.

For a VDI environment to be considered truly resilient, it must go beyond these traditional methods and offer:

  • Self-healing storage that can survive multiple drive failures.
  • Multi-node redundancy that intelligently shifts workloads without performance loss.
  • Built-in high availability that prevents downtime without complex manual intervention.

Ensuring VDI Resilience with a Distributed, Resilient Architecture

Ensuring VDI Resilience

A highly resilient VDI infrastructure must eliminate single points of failure and distribute resources across nodes to ensure seamless operation even during hardware failures.

A next-generation VDI platform should incorporate:

  • Distributed storage mirroring: Instead of relying on RAID, data should be mirrored across multiple nodes, allowing desktops and applications to remain accessible without the prolonged performance impact of a RAID rebuild.
  • Automated failover: If a compute node fails, virtual desktops should intelligently shift to another node, which is most qualified to host them, without user disruption or IT intervention.
  • Per-VM and per-disk fault tolerance: Protecting individual VDI sessions and applications at a granular level ensures that even partial infrastructure failures don’t impact the entire environment.
  • Self-healing capabilities: The system should automatically rebalance data and workloads in the background, reducing IT workload and recovery times.

VergeOS: Ensuring VDI Resilience Without Complexity

VergeOS is designed to deliver a highly resilient VDI infrastructure by integrating virtualization, storage, and networking into a single, fault-tolerant platform. Unlike traditional virtualization platforms that rely on RAID-based storage or software-defined storage layers that introduce bottlenecks, VergeOS provides:

  • Multi-node fault tolerance: If a node fails, workloads are intelligently transferred to another node without performance degradation.
  • Distributed mirroring instead of RAID: Data is mirrored across multiple storage devices, ensuring production performance without RAID-rebuild overhead.
  • Cluster Hot Spare: VergeOS’ ioGuardian protects from multiple simultaneous drive or server failures, providing data to impacted virtual desktops inline without interruption.
  • No dependency on external storage: Traditional SAN or NAS solutions introduce single points of failure. VergeOS eliminates this risk by making storage an integrated, distributed component of the virtualization platform while providing superior performance.
  • Automatic recovery and rebalancing: The system self-heals by redistributing workloads, reducing administrative overhead.

With VergeOS, IT teams can ensure that VDI infrastructure is always more reliable than a user’s laptop, providing uninterrupted access even in the face of hardware failures.

Ensuring VDI Resilience from Data Center Disaster

Beyond local resilience, organizations must also prepare for full-site outages caused by natural disasters, power failures, or regional disruptions. A robust VDI strategy includes protecting users from node and drive failures and ensuring that the entire desktop environment can fail over to a secondary location with minimal disruption.

VergeOS addresses this challenge by integrating VergeFabric, a built-in software-defined networking layer that supports advanced routing protocols such as BGP (Border Gateway Protocol). When combined with VergeOS’s native replication capabilities, this allows organizations to replicate virtual desktops and application workloads between primary and secondary sites securely and efficiently. Routing can automatically shift users to the secondary location in a disaster without requiring manual reconfiguration.

This level of integration ensures that VDI environments are protected at the hardware and cluster level and resilient across geographic regions. Users can continue accessing their virtual desktops from anywhere, even if the primary site becomes unavailable—delivering true business continuity for the virtual desktop infrastructure.

📺 Learn More About Ensuring VDI Resilience.
Watch our detailed on-demand webinar with VergeIO, Inuvika, and Kelley Allen from CCSI demonstrating their resilient VDI solution.
Register here.

Conclusion

VDI success depends on reliability. Organizations investing in virtual desktops must ensure their infrastructure is built for resilience, not just performance. Traditional RAID-based storage and clustered compute architectures introduce points of failure that can disrupt users and drive up IT support costs.

A resilient VDI platform must:

  • Protect against node and drive failures without downtime.
  • Eliminate RAID limitations with a more flexible, distributed storage approach.
  • Automate recovery and rebalancing to minimize IT intervention.
  • Ensure uninterrupted user access, no matter what happens at the hardware level.

By choosing an integrated, efficient, fault-tolerant architecture, IT leaders can provide a seamless, always-on VDI experience that outperforms the reliability of any physical laptop or desktop.

Filed Under: VDI Tagged With: , ,

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New Prometheus-based tool enhances monitoring, troubleshooting, and capacity planning for VergeOS environments—now available for Linux, Windows, and macOS.

Ann Arbor, Michigan – April 8, 2025 — VergeIO, the leader in software-defined data center operating systems and the top VMware alternative, today announced the availability of ioMetrics, a Prometheus-compatible monitoring solution purpose-built to provide granular observability across VergeOS environments. ioMetrics gives organizations detailed insight into virtual storage, compute, and networking layers—streamlining performance management, capacity planning, and proactive alerting.

Designed for integration with modern observability platforms like Grafana, LogicMonitor, and Dynatrace, ioMetrics brings third-party monitoring to VergeOS environments for the first time.

“Our customers want the power of VergeOS with the visibility of enterprise observability stacks,” said Jason Yaeger, SVP of Engineering at VergeIO. “ioMetrics bridges that gap, giving IT teams the insights they need to scale confidently and resolve issues before they impact users.”

Comprehensive Infrastructure Metrics—Exposed

ioMetrics collects and publishes detailed metrics from VergeOS environments, with a focus on three key layers:

  • VSAN Tier Monitoring
    Capacity, usage, and allocation per tier; transaction and repair counts; drive health and temperature; and detailed read/write performance metrics.
  • Cluster Insights
    Total and online node tracking; memory and CPU usage; number of active virtual machines; and fault domain visibility.
  • Node and Hardware Metrics
    Per-core CPU utilization, network interface throughput, drive utilization and health stats, and node-level availability reporting.

These metrics are exposed via a lightweight HTTP endpoint and scraped natively by Prometheus. ioMetrics is written in Go and designed for minimal resource usage.

Used by Service Providers to Streamline Operations

Managed Service Providers (MSPs), Cloud Service Providers (CSPs), and Bare Metal Service Providers (BMS) are rapidly adopting ioMetrics to bring real-time infrastructure visibility into their operational workflows. By integrating VergeOS into their existing dashboards, providers are eliminating blind spots and simplifying how their support and NOC teams monitor health, performance, and availability across their environments.

ioMetrics gives service providers the ability to:

  • Consolidate VergeOS metrics into existing Grafana or Prometheus-based dashboards
  • Set real-time alerts for CPU, memory, and storage thresholds
  • Monitor cluster and tenant performance alongside application workloads
  • Detect early warning signs of hardware failure or resource imbalance
  • Build unified views across customer VDCs, hosts, and storage tiers

“The new exporter allows our customers to bring VergeOS into the heart of their existing Grafana dashboards,” said Larry Ludlow, Principal Engineer at VergeIO. “They can now correlate VergeOS metrics alongside application data and infrastructure performance for complete situational awareness.”

Built for Every Environment

To meet the needs of heterogeneous IT teams, ioMetrics is available for all major platforms, including:

  • Linux
  • Windows
  • macOS

It can be deployed as a system service and managed alongside existing monitoring agents or infrastructure code.

Benefits for VergeIO Customers

  • Enhanced Visibility: Track key performance indicators across VSAN, cluster, and node layers using open monitoring tools.
  • Proactive Issue Detection: Monitor drive health, repair cycles, CPU stress, and thermal conditions before they cause service disruptions.
  • Optimized Capacity Planning: Plan hardware growth based on accurate usage and trend data—down to individual drives and cores.
  • Seamless Integration: Easily integrate VergeOS with Prometheus-based stacks including Grafana, LogicMonitor, and Dynatrace.
  • Cross-Platform Support: Deploy ioMetrics wherever you monitor—Linux servers, macOS laptops, or Windows desktops.

What’s Next

Future releases of ioMetrics will expand metric coverage to include VM, tenant, and NAS-level insights, enabling even deeper visibility into virtual workloads and storage consumption patterns.

ioMetrics is available now on GitHub Releases with full documentation and setup instructions.

“Monitoring isn’t optional—it’s essential,” added Yan Ness, CEO of VergeIO. “ioMetrics brings the depth of infrastructure monitoring our customers need, with the open ecosystem support they expect.”

About VergeIO

VergeIO is the leading VMware alternative. Its software-defined data center operating system, VergeOS, combines virtualization, storage, and networking into a unified platform. By eliminating the need for separate hypervisors, SANs, and networking overlays, VergeIO dramatically simplifies IT infrastructure while delivering the performance, scalability, and multi-tenancy that modern environments demand.

Media Contact
Judy Smith
JPR
[email protected]
818-522-9673

Filed Under: Press Release

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World Backup Day is a timely reminder that data loss is still a threat—and that most IT environments still rely on traditional backup software to stay safe. But what if your IT infrastructure didn’t need conventional backup strategies?

What if your virtual infrastructure could natively withstand drive failures, server outages, ransomware attacks, or even a complete site loss—without relying on third-party backup applications or complex recovery workflows?

That’s the promise of VergeOS, a replacement for legacy hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platforms. It is designed for resilience from the ground up. With VergeOS, backup software becomes optional, not essential. Traditional backups shift from a daily requirement to a long-term archival tool.

Resilience Begins at the Core

VergeOS integrates data protection, storage, virtualization, and networking, unlike legacy infrastructure, into a unified platform. Ultraconverged Infrastructure (UCI) is a new architectural model that consolidates core IT functions into a single, self-protecting platform. It requires no external backup tools and no add-on orchestration layers. VergeOS delivers resilience by design.

Rethink backup this World Backup Day

VergeOS runs like firmware and injects a read-write operating environment only, when Virtual Data Centers (VDCs) are deployed. This approach hardens the entire platform and reduces the attack surface for ransomware and malware.

Protection from Drive Failures

Protection continues at the storage layer with distributed mirroring. VergeOS ensures that every write is simultaneously committed to multiple physical drives across various nodes. This eliminates the need for expensive RAID hardware and slow RAID rebuilds. It also avoids the bottlenecks associated with parity-based protection while providing seamless recovery from individual drive failures without user intervention.

Protection from Multiple Simultaneous Failures

Rethink backup this World Backup Day

For environments that demand an even higher level of resilience, VergeOS includes ioGuardian, a built-in mechanism designed to protect against multiple simultaneous failures. Whether it’s multiple drives failing within a node, across nodes, or losing multiple nodes, ioGuardian dynamically distributes data and metadata with added fault isolation to preserve availability. It continually evaluates health status across the cluster and adjusts real-time data placement and mirroring to maintain complete protection. With ioGuardian, VergeOS doesn’t just survive failure—it adapts to it, maintaining integrity and uptime in even the most extreme scenarios.

Protection from Accidental Deletion

Sometimes, users make mistakes, or applications corrupt data. World Backup Day proponents will suggest that protection from accidental deletion is where backup software shines, but a well-protected infrastructure software solution should protect against more than hardware failures. VergeOS includes a powerful snapshot mechanism based on its ioClone technology. Unlike legacy snapshot technologies that introduce latency or consume excessive storage, ioClone leverages VergeOS’ Global Inline Deduplication, which is fully integrated with the file system.

Administrators can take VM-level, Virtual Data Center-level, or entire instance-wide snapshots multiple times per hour and retain them indefinitely without impacting performance. VergeOS also includes an integrated scheduling tool that allows snapshots to be created and retained according to organizational policies or regulatory requirements. These snapshots can all be drilled into to provide granular recovery—entire VDCs, VMs, or even individual files—in seconds.

Our hands-on labs will show you exactly how VergeOS data protection works.

High Availability Without External Dependencies

VergeOS also handles compute resilience natively. High Availability is built into the platform, allowing workloads to automatically shift to healthy nodes in the event of server failure. There’s no need for external clustering software or external shared storage configurations.

Protection From Ransomware

Security events like ransomware are also addressed directly within the platform. VDCs limit the attack surface, preventing ransomware from spreading beyond the VDC it first enters. ioFortify alerts you to an attack within five to ten minutes of it starting, enabling you to identify the best known-good state snapshot for almost instant recovery from an attack.

Protection From Full-Site Failure

Despite what World Backup Day proponents suggest, backups alone are not DR. When you need to protect the organization from full-site failure, VergeOS includes ioReplicate. With Virtual Data Centers and the integrated VergeFabric networking, ioReplicate enables seamless failover to a secondary site. VergeOS handles IP failover via BGP and maintains workload isolation and configuration across sites. Disaster recovery doesn’t require a separate orchestration layer—it’s already part of the platform.

Rethink backup this World Backup Day

Eliminate Backup Software—and Its Costs

This level of built-in protection eliminates the need for traditional backup software and its licensing fees. It also allows organizations to eliminate the complexity of maintaining a separate backup infrastructure. When customers switch to VergeOS, they free themselves from VMware’s ever-increasing licensing fees—and from paying for backup software they no longer need.

Don’t Back Up. Build Differently.

This World Backup Day, it’s time to rethink what data protection should look like. Instead of building more backup infrastructure, consider building production infrastructure that doesn’t depend on it.

Watch the Slide-Free Webinar On Demand

Want to see all of these capabilities in action?
👉 Register now to watch the on-demand VergeOS data protection demo
This slide-free session walks through live demonstrations of VergeOS features, including snapshots, high availability, ransomware protection, replication, and more.

Filed Under: Protection

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Solving VDI Boot Storms is the number one requirement to driving Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) adoption. VDI has become essential for organizations supporting remote workforces, educational institutions, healthcare providers, and engineering firms. However, despite its advantages, VDI deployments frequently face significant storage challenges—especially during boot storms.

Why Do VDI Boot Storms Occur?

Boot storms happen when many virtual desktops simultaneously boot up or log in, causing a sudden surge of storage activity. Traditional storage architectures, including most virtual SAN (vSAN) solutions, struggle to handle these simultaneous I/O demands, resulting in significant latency and reduced performance.

The vSAN Bottleneck

Although vSANs are appealing for their potential cost savings, their architecture typically relies on running storage as an application inside a virtual machine (VM) under the control of the hypervisor. This additional software layer introduces significant overhead and performance inefficiencies, particularly under heavy workloads like a boot storm.

Examples of this approach include VMware vSAN and Nutanix AOS Storage. This architecture involves multiple steps for each storage request:

Solving VDI Boot Storms
  1. The application VM sends an I/O request to the hypervisor.
  2. The hypervisor routes the request to the storage VM.
  3. The storage VM processes the request and communicates back to the hypervisor.
  4. The hypervisor delivers the response back to the application VM.

This multi-step interaction introduces latency, increases hypervisor dependency, and degrades overall performance, especially during intensive scenarios like boot storms. Moreover, vSAN-based solutions require storage VMs to frequently coordinate metadata and resiliency across nodes, creating additional network load and complexity.

The Scale Problem

Boot storms are particularly problematic in environments with hundreds or thousands of virtual desktops booting simultaneously. Each desktop generates a surge of storage I/O requests that must be processed in real-time. In large VDI environments, this I/O demand can overwhelm vSAN-based systems, leading to:

  • Slow login times, with users experiencing delays of 2-5 minutes when starting their desktops.
  • Unresponsive applications, as latency spikes impact application launch times and in-session performance.
  • Infrastructure strain, as overloaded storage controllers and network congestion slow down overall system responsiveness.

Imagine this I/O back-and-forth between the virtual desktop, the hypervisor, and the storage VM happening 1,000 times per second while hundreds of virtual desktops are simultaneously booting. Even all-flash vSAN solutions cannot eliminate this inefficiency, as the multi-layered architecture and the need for metadata synchronization across nodes still constrain them.

The High Cost of Solving VDI Boot Storms with AFAs

Due to these limitations, many organizations resort to dedicated all-flash arrays (AFA) to handle the storage-intensive nature of boot storms. While AFAs improve performance, they significantly raise the cost per desktop, making VDI a much more expensive proposition. A storage infrastructure that should enable cost savings instead becomes one of the biggest budget concerns for IT teams.

For a more detailed breakdown of vSAN limitations and how they impact performance, read the whitepaper:
Understanding vSAN Limitations in High-Demand Environments

The Problem with Deduplication and RAID in VDI

Many storage solutions use deduplication and RAID for efficiency and data protection. However, these technologies introduce additional challenges during boot storms.

  • Deduplication Bottlenecks: Deduplication optimizes storage by reducing redundant data blocks. However, during a boot storm, hundreds of virtual desktops simultaneously access the same deduplicated blocks, creating a bottleneck. A single storage controller is forced to serve thousands of requests from the same physical block, leading to I/O contention and severe performance degradation.
  • RAID Parity Overhead: Traditional RAID architectures, particularly RAID 5 and RAID 6, use parity calculations to provide data protection. These calculations add substantial processing overhead. During a boot storm, the storage system must handle thousands of simultaneous read operations, forcing RAID controllers to decode parity data rapidly. This not only slows boot times but also creates an imbalance in read/write workloads.

These factors make traditional storage solutions fundamentally unfit for high-scale VDI environments.

Introducing VergeFS: A Better Approach

Solving VDI boot storms requires a highly integrated, performance-oriented storage solution to effectively overcome these challenges. VergeFS, integrated directly into VergeOS, offers a compelling alternative to traditional vSAN architectures and avoids the high cost per desktop of dedicated all-flash arrays. Unlike typical vSAN solutions that require additional software layers or dedicated storage hardware, VergeFS is built directly into VergeOS, eliminating unnecessary overhead and complexity.

Solving VDI Boot Storms with VergeFS

VergeFS’s integrated architecture ensures exceptionally efficient I/O handling, allowing it to handle boot storms seamlessly. It achieves bare-metal-level performance by simplifying data paths, eliminating the overhead commonly associated with external storage arrays, vSANs, or complex RAID configurations.

  • Integrated Storage and Compute: VergeFS and the hypervisor runs within the same code base, eliminating the need for separate storage VMs and removing unnecessary I/O hops.
  • Efficient I/O Distribution: Instead of centralizing I/O requests to a storage VM, VergeFS distributes them across multiple storage nodes, allowing the entire infrastructure to handle storage loads efficiently.
  • Efficient Deduplication: Integrated within the same code base as VergeOS, it enhances all facets of the infrastructure and incurs immeasurable additional overhead due to sharing identical metadata.
  • No RAID Bottlenecks: VergeFS replaces RAID parity calculations with a distributed mirroring approach, significantly reducing latency and improving boot performance.

The Advantages of VergeOS Deduplication

VergeOS eliminates the deduplication issue by integrating it natively within the core of its architecture. Because VergeFS and VergeOS share a common code base, deduplication is not a bolted-on feature or post-processing task—it is part of the storage fabric itself. Metadata used for deduplication is the same metadata leveraged for managing the file system and data distribution, incurring negligible overhead. This efficient design enables VergeFS to deliver the capacity-saving benefits of deduplication without compromising I/O performance during even the most demanding boot storms.

Solving VDI Boot Storms with Distributed Mirroring

One of VergeFS’s key advantages is its use of distributed mirroring, enabling multiple drives to feed data requests simultaneously. Unlike RAID configurations that require parity decoding, distributed mirroring directly serves data from multiple mirrored copies across storage drives, drastically reducing latency and increasing throughput during intensive I/O operations.

Additionally, VergeOS’ integrated deduplication offsets the capacity penalty common with other mirrored data protection models. This means IT teams get the benefits of high-performance mirroring without excessive storage overhead.

Real-World Results with VergeFS

Solving VDI boot storms with VergeFS has been independently verified by reputable third parties and at customer deployments. These proof points demonstrate the significant performance advantages of VergeFS.

  • Storage Review Validation: Independent testing by Storage Review confirmed that VergeOS, leveraging VergeFS, successfully booted 1,000 virtual machines in under 70 seconds—far beyond what is possible with traditional vSAN architectures.
  • 6X Faster than VMware and Omnissa: CCSI, a Desktop-as-a-Service provider and VergeIO customer, found that virtual desktops running on VergeFS booted up to six times faster compared to equivalent environments using VMware Horizon or Omnissa.

This real-world validation shows that VergeFS delivers tangible performance benefits that translate directly into improved user experience and reduced IT overhead.

The Cost Advantage

By eliminating costly add-ons like AFAs, reducing hardware requirements, and removing RAID-based performance bottlenecks, VergeFS significantly lowers the cost per virtual desktop. A VergeFS deployment is 10X less expensive than using a dedicated AFA. IT teams can scale VDI deployments more affordably while maintaining high-performance standards.

For more insights into choosing the right VDI infrastructure, download the whitepaper:
Choosing The Right Alternative to VMware Horizon and Citrix for VDI Solutions.

Conclusion

Organizations facing VDI storage challenges, especially boot storms, should strongly consider solutions designed explicitly for efficiency and performance. VergeFS, fully integrated into VergeOS, provides a proven alternative to traditional VDI storage architectures, ensuring rapid, predictable boot performance even under heavy load conditions.

By adopting VergeFS, IT teams can eliminate RAID bottlenecks, reduce complexity, avoid the high cost of dedicated all-flash storage and eliminate future storage refreshes, all while delivering a seamless user experience.

Learn more by attending our live webinar:
Register for the VDI Alternatives Webinar on March 27, 2025

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