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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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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

Filed Under: VDI Tagged With: , ,

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The move saves $150,000 annually and boosts IT efficiency

Ann Arbor, MI – February 18th, 2025 – Lancaster Central School District has successfully transitioned to VergeIO’s VergeOS, achieving $150,000 in annual cost savings while improving performance, data protection, and storage efficiency.

Prior to the transition, the district faced a substantial increase in licensing costs, creating budget concerns. Additionally, the previous solution fell short in storage efficiency, struggling with deduplication, snapshot performance, and resiliency. Lancaster’s IT team evaluated multiple virtualization solutions in search of a more cost-effective and high-performance alternative before selecting VergeIO’s integrated ultraconverged infrastructure platform.

“We needed a solution that wasn’t just a replacement for our existing virtualization platform, but an improvement. VergeIO delivered exactly that.”
– Eric Miller, Manager of Information Services, Lancaster Central School District

Challenges with Previous Virtualized SAN Solutions

Before transitioning, Lancaster encountered several issues with its previous virtualized SAN solution, including:

  • Rising capacity-based licensing costs, making budgeting unpredictable
  • Snapshot performance degradation, limiting recovery options
  • Inefficient deduplication, increasing storage requirements
  • Complex stretched cluster dependencies, leading to potential disruptions

Why Lancaster Chose VergeIO

After a thorough evaluation, VergeIO stood out as the preferred option due to its cost-effectiveness, storage integration, and ease of use. VergeIO directly integrates storage into the hypervisor, unlike other virtualization solutions, eliminating the need for external storage solutions.

Additional factors that influenced Lancaster’s decision included:

  • Superior support – VergeIO offers 100% US-based support with direct access to engineers
  • Inline global deduplication – VergeFS reduced storage consumption without performance penalties
  • Snapshot performance – VergeFS snapshots are instantaneous and impact-free, enabling more reliable backups and recovery
  • Resiliency improvements – Unlike Lancaster’s previous stretched clusters, VergeIO’s active-active deployment maintained uptime during ISP failures, ensuring seamless operations

“We wanted a system that did not require constant monitoring. VergeIO is so good at handling things behind the scenes that we can concentrate on improving and developing new solutions for our district leveraging the VergeIO platform.”
– Tim Johnson, Systems Administrator, Lancaster Central School District

Seamless Migration and Immediate Benefits

Lancaster deployed VergeIO in May 2024 as a proof of concept and completed its full transition to production workloads by November 2024. The move resulted in:

  • $150,000 in annual cost savings by eliminating substantial license fee increases
  • Simplified IT operations, allowing the team to focus on strategic projects
  • Improved storage efficiency with VergeFS’s global deduplication
  • Eliminated VMware’s performance bottlenecks, including snapshot and cluster dependency issues

“Lancaster Central School District’s move to VergeIO is a perfect example of how organizations can escape rising virtualization costs while improving operational efficiency. We look forward to supporting Lancaster’s journey and helping more organizations make the switch.”
– Yan Ness, CEO of VergeIO

Comparing vSAN Alternatives: Free Expert Webinar

For IT professionals facing similar challenges, VergeIO is hosting a live webinar featuring storage and virtualization expert Marc Staimer and VergeIO’s Chief Marketing Officer George Crump.

This webinar will provide an in-depth comparison of VMware vSAN, Nutanix AOS Storage, and VergeIO VergeFS, helping IT teams make informed decisions on cost, performance, and data resiliency.

Webinar Details

📅 Date: February 19, 2024
⏰ Time: 1:00 PM ET / 10:00 AM PT
📧 Register: No forms, just reply to this email with “Yes”

🔗 Learn More and Register

About Lancaster Central School District

Lancaster Central School District serves the Lancaster, NY community, providing innovative educational programs and advanced technology solutions to enhance student learning. The district’s commitment to technology modernization ensures a reliable and efficient IT infrastructure that supports students, educators, and administrators.

About VergeIO

VergeIO is the future of virtualization and the leading VMware alternative. Unlike traditional hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), VergeIO’s ultraconverged infrastructure (UCI) collapses the virtualization, storage, and networking stack into an integrated data center operating environment, VergeOS. Its efficiency enables greater workload density using existing hardware while improving data resiliency. The result is dramatically lower costs, improved availability, and simplified IT operations.

For more information, visit www.verge.io.

Media Contact

Judy Smith, JPR Communications
📧 [email protected]
📞 818-522-9673

Filed Under: Press Release Tagged With: , , ,

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When evaluating the data protection capabilities of a vSAN alternative, understanding vSAN snapshots is as crucial as ensuring that it offers high performance and scalability. Although many vSAN solutions provide granular protection and recovery options, the ability to recover entire environments in one step—macro recovery—is equally significant. Without it, IT teams may struggle with hundreds of individual VM recoveries, resulting in excessive downtime and operational disruption.

Understanding vSAN Snapshot Limitations

The first step in understanding vSAN snapshots is learning what level of granularity they provide. Most vSAN platforms, such as VMware vSAN and Nutanix AOS Storage, operate at the virtual machine (VM) level concerning snapshots. In these environments, snapshots are generally managed per VM, allowing for the restoration of individual VMs and potentially even files when necessary.

Granular recovery is an essential operational feature—IT teams require the capability to recover a single deleted file or restore an application VM that was accidentally corrupted. However, when disaster strikes on a larger scale, such as:

  • A ransomware attack that encrypts workloads or dozens of VMs
  • A storage system failure affecting multiple VMs
  • A major misconfiguration or corruption event

IT teams must recover individual VMs and entire business units, departments, or data center environments. Unfortunately, neither VMware vSAN nor Nutanix AOS Storage offers macro recovery capabilities, forcing IT administrators to restore each VM individually, significantly extending downtime.

The granular structure of many vSAN alternative snapshots complicates protecting the entire environment. Although VMs can typically be grouped by “tag” for protection, the underlying software continues to operate per VM. It must manage dozens or even hundreds of individual snapshots per snapshot interval in the background.

VM-only granularity also makes it challenging to achieve consistent states across environments, not only among VMs but also in infrastructure-wide settings such as networking and other configurations. If these settings fall out of sync or go unrecorded, recovery becomes more challenging and prolongs the time needed to return to normal operations.

Lastly, VM-only granularity increases the load on metadata. Because executing a snapshot of a workload may lead to dozens of managed instances, metadata management becomes complex and bloated. This complexity is why most vSAN solutions limit the number of active snapshots per VM.

Understanding vSAN Snapshots Macro Protection Capabilities

Macro recovery allows IT teams to restore entire groups of workloads at once—whether it’s a collection of business units, dozens of branch offices, or a multi-tenant environment. Protecting and recovering these entities in a single movement is essential because it provides:

  1. Faster recovery from large-scale failures – Instead of recovering hundreds of VMs manually, macro recovery restores an entire encapsulated environment, including environmental settings, in one data-consistent step, significantly reducing downtime.
  2. Streamlined Metadata Management – Since one snapshot can now represent a dozen, a hundred, or even a thousand VMs, metadata is much less burdensome on the operating environment. Macro snapshots enable IT to execute snapshots almost continuously without any impact on performance.
  3. Stronger ransomware protection – Cyberattacks don’t just target single VMs; they encrypt entire workloads. Macro recovery enables point-in-time restoration of entire environments, allowing organizations to roll back to a known good state within minutes.
  4. Multi-tenancy protection – In environments where multiple departments or customers operate on shared infrastructure, macro recovery ensures that a single tenant’s data can be restored without impacting others.
  5. Simplified Site Recovery — Macro data protection and recovery also tackle one of the key challenges organizations encounter during a site disaster: synchronizing infrastructure configuration data, network information, and hypervisor configuration settings with the data being replicated. Without macro protection, the recovery process is manual, hindering the effort and failing to meet recovery time objectives (RTO).

How VergeIO Enables Macro Protection

Understanding vSAN Snapshots

Understanding vSAN snapshots will help you realize the advantages of VergeIO’s approach. Unlike VMware vSAN and Nutanix, VergeIO’s VergeOS includes built-in macro recovery capabilities. With infrastructure-wide and Virtual Data Center (VDC) -level snapshots, IT teams can capture entire environments—not just individual VMs. These snapshots simultaneously capture all metadata and configuration information alongside the data, ensuring consistency. As a result, VergeOS can restore the entire infrastructure or a complete workload in a single operation.

Granularity isn’t sacrificed for VergeOS’s macro recoverability. IT can drill into an instance-wide or VDC snapshot and extract an individual VM for recovery. Individual VM snapshots can be mounted as drives to the production version of the VM, enabling single-file recovery simply by copying data between drives.

At the same time, VergeOS can snapshot at the VM level, but with VergeOS, VM-level snapshots are the exception, not the rule. A VM-level snapshot can be executed for special situations where a VM needs extra protection or longer retention times.

Understanding vSAN Snapshots

VergeFS snapshots are remarkably efficient, allowing frequent snapshots without compromising performance. High frequency without any performance impact ensures that organizations can always revert to a recent, clean state, whether recovering from a ransomware attack, a catastrophic failure, or retrieving a document that a user accidentally overwrote just 15 minutes prior.

Get Macro Protection, Move Beyond VM-Only Granularity

Granular recovery is essential, but macro recovery is a powerful complement when minimizing downtime and ensuring business continuity. If you’re evaluating vSAN alternatives, ensure the solutions you consider can restore entire environments quickly and efficiently—not just individual files or VMs. Check out this VMware Alternative data protection checklist.

Understanding vSAN Snapshots: Free Expert Webinar

For IT professionals encountering similar challenges, VergeIO is hosting a live webinar with storage and virtualization expert Marc Staimer and VergeIO’s Chief Marketing Officer, George Crump.

This webinar will comprehensively compare VMware vSAN, Nutanix AOS Storage, and VergeIO VergeFS, assisting IT teams in making informed decisions regarding cost, performance, and data resilience.

Webinar Details

📅 Date: February 19, 2024
⏰ Time: 1:00 PM ET / 10:00 AM PT

🔗 Learn More & Register

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A double-protected VMware alternative allows organizations to lower licensing expenses and enhance their data resilience. With the rise of infrastructure threats and the need for continuity of operations, IT should leverage this infrastructure shift to boost its recovery capabilities from accidental file deletions, server or drive failures, site disasters, and long-term data retention needs.

A robust VMware alternative must provide two layers of protection: real-time infrastructure resilience and long-term data protection. VergeIO and Storware work together to create a double-protected solution, combining real-time safeguards like ioGuardian, ioClone (snapshots), and ioReplicate with long-term retention and archival capabilities provided by Storware Backup and Recovery.

This approach delivers the strongest data protection strategy and allows IT teams to leverage existing server and backup storage hardware, reducing costs and eliminating the need for rip-and-replace upgrades.

First Layer of Protection: Built-in Infrastructure Resiliency

Many VMware alternatives rely heavily on third-party backup solutions for protection, leaving gaps in immediate recovery and real-time failure resilience. A double-protected VMware alternative must first integrate infrastructure-native data protection that ensures data availability without relying on backups for everyday failures.

ioGuardian: Continuous Failure Detection and Recovery

The foundation of VergeIO’s built-in resiliency is ioGuardian, which proactively monitors infrastructure health and automatically reroutes workloads in the event of drive or node failures. Unlike traditional instant-recovery solutions that require IT intervention, ioGuardian provides real-time, automated protection that keeps applications running without delays or downtime. It also protects against multiple simultaneous drive failures, ensuring data remains accessible even in worst-case scenarios.

ioClone: Instant, Space-Efficient Snapshots

Snapshots are a critical component of an effective data resilience strategy, but most legacy HCI and VMware solutions create performance bottlenecks when snapshots accumulate. VergeIO’s ioClone snapshots eliminate this issue by providing instant, space-efficient, performance-neutral snapshots that IT can use to recover from accidental deletions and system corruption quickly. Snapshots can even be used to recover from ransomware attacks because they are read-only from inception.

ioReplicate: Multi-Site Data Resiliency

VergeIO offers ioReplicate, an efficient, WAN-optimized replication engine that enables real-time or scheduled replication to offsite locations for organizations needing geo-redundancy. This ensures that even in the event of a primary site failure, IT teams can rapidly failover and restore operations from a secondary location.

Global Inline Deduplication

VergeOS features integrated global inline deduplication, the foundation for both ioClone and ioReplicate. This technology decreases storage consumption by ensuring that unique data blocks are written, greatly enhancing efficiency. Removing redundant data globally improves storage performance and maximizes available capacity, making snapshots and replication operations even more cost-effective.

Second Layer of Protection: Long-Term Data Retention

A double-protected VMware alternative requires more than built-in resiliency and data availability in real-time. IT teams also need a long-term data protection strategy to defend against data corruption, cyber threats, and to meet compliance requirements.

Storware Backup and Recovery: Deep Integration with VergeIO

Storware extends VergeIO’s protection by offering long-term backup retention, compliance archiving, and multi-destination backup support, allowing organizations to meet regulatory and business continuity requirements. Unlike traditional backup solutions, Storware is directly integrated into VergeOS, enabling seamless backup of ioClone snapshots and leveraging VergeIO’s changed block tracking (CBT) for faster, storage-efficient backups.

To learn more about VergeIO’s and Storware’s Double Protection and to see it in action, watch our on-demand webinar, “Exit VMware, Retain Server and Backup Hardware.”

Use Existing Server and Backup Storage Hardware

VergeOS enhances flexibility by supporting a broad range of existing server hardware. With its intelligent resource allocation and ability to run on nearly any x86 hardware purchased in the last six years, IT teams can continue using their current infrastructure instead of refreshing everything simultaneously.

One of the most costly aspects of transitioning off of VMware is replacing backup infrastructure due to compatibility limitations with new platforms. Storware removes this concern by supporting a wide range of backup storage hardware, including:

  • Existing NAS/SAN backup storage
  • Object storage (on-prem and cloud-based)
  • Backup appliances from vendors like Rubrik, ExaGrid, and Dell EMC

Storware: Keep Your Existing Backup Storage

Storware enables IT teams to continue using their existing backup storage infrastructure, eliminating the need to purchase new backup appliances. Whether organizations rely on on-premises storage or cloud-based repositories, Storware provides seamless backup and archival capabilities. This flexibility helps businesses reduce costs while ensuring backup operations remain efficient and secure.

ioOptimize: Extending Hardware Lifespan

VergeOS includes ioOptimize, a technology designed to maximize the efficiency of existing hardware. By intelligently distributing workloads, optimizing storage, and reducing system overhead, ioOptimize allows organizations to extend the life of their current infrastructure while also improving performance. IT teams can repurpose aging servers and storage systems rather than retiring them early, ultimately reducing costs and making infrastructure refresh cycles more flexible.

The Most Data-Resilient VMware Alternative

VergeIO believes that data protection and resiliency is a shared responsibility. The combination of VergeIO and Storware creates the most resilient VMware alternative, delivering:

  • Real-time failure detection and recovery with ioGuardian
  • Instant, space-efficient snapshots with ioClone
  • Multi-site data replication with ioReplicate
  • Fast, storage-efficient backups with Storware’s CBT integration
  • Long-term retention and archival capabilities using existing backup storage hardware
  • Extended server lifecycle with ioOptimize

With VergeIO’s built-in resilience and Storware’s long-term data protection, IT teams can confidently transition from VMware without sacrificing security, availability, or infrastructure flexibility.

Conclusion

A VMware exit should not come at the cost of data protection or hardware flexibility. VergeIO and Storware provide a double-protected VMware alternative that delivers real-time resilience and long-term security, ensuring IT teams reduce costs, enhance uptime, and retain control over their infrastructure.

Organizations looking to exit VMware now have a cost-effective, highly available, and deeply resilient alternative that protects both today and into the future.

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