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HCI

The ROI of a VMware Exit

March 8, 2023 by George Crump Leave a Comment

The impending Broadcom acquisition, ever-increasing prices, and stalled innovation have many customers wondering how to calculate the ROI of a VMware Exit. There are several factors to consider when calculating the return on investment of a VMware Exit:

the ROI of a VMware Exit
  • What is the cost difference in software?
  • What additional hardware is required?
  • How much effort is there in conversion?
  • Are there any other residual savings?

The Software ROI of a VMware Exit

The primary motivation for looking for a VMware alternative is saving money, and the software license cost is at the top of the list. VMware pricing is both expensive and is increasing. Many VMware customers indicate that their renewal price will increase, and they fear that the renewal rate will increase further once the Broadcom acquisition is complete.

VMware pricing is also complex. There are multiple modules to purchase, and there are classifications within those modules based on the number of CPUs and cores in each node within the cluster. The documentation on the VMware site about licensing is rather lengthy, and each separate module (VSAN, NSX, etc…) needs a separate license. Determining the exact price of a VMware license is a challenge partly because of this complexity and partly because it seems each customer gets a different price.

VergeOS, an Affordable VMware Alternative

Even before the price increases and uncertainty of the Broadcom acquisition, customers were flocking to VergeOS because of its efficiency and simplicity. The VergeOS pricing model is simple. It is per node, regardless of each node’s number of processors, cores, RAM, or storage capacity. It typically is less than half the price of VMware. VergeIO also has a five-year price lock option, so not only is there a fast ROI, but there is also the added benefit of pricing stability.

The Hardware Required for a VMware Exit

Many vendors require you to buy new hardware as you make your VMware exit, even if the servers supporting the current environment are more than up to the task. They may need more powerful hardware to run their hypervisor, or they may not support the hardware you are using today, especially if it is more than a few years old. Buying new hardware significantly increases the time it takes to realize an ROI.


Most infrastructure software (hypervisor, storage, and network) is inefficient. These solutions convert the stacks to software but layer them on top of each other instead of integrating them into a singular code base. The layering only increases their inefficiency and complexity.

VergeOS, A Model of Efficiency

VergeOS completely integrates the infrastructure rotating it 90° into a single linear plane. The tight, efficient code base can abstract more performance and capacity from the existing server hardware. Once switching to VergeOS, most organizations can, using the same hardware, increase the number of workloads and even virtualize workloads previously deemed bare-metal-only.

the ROI of a VMware Exit

Leveraging the existing server hardware delivers a positive return on investment much faster than solutions that must replace the server hardware. Extending the life of the existing server hardware also means that the customer can delay the next round of server upgrades, further accelerating ROI.

The Effort of a VMware Exit

One of the most significant considerations when calculating the ROI of a VMware exit is how difficult it is to switch from VMware to the new platform. Also critical is determining what resources are required to do so with minimal time and disruption. While some alternative hypervisors have some form of VMware import, they require that you pause the VMware environment as you convert one VM at a time. Then you must keep VMware “paused” while testing the converted VMs and workloads. The process is slow and requires far too lengthy application outages.

VergeOS, Seamless Migration

VergeOS enables you to migrate your VMs from VMware while they are still running. Our IOmigrate capability leverages change block tracking (CBT) to update the Verge OS VMs incrementally. You can use this method to extensively test your VMs in the VergeIO environment until you are satisfied that everything will work as planned. Many customers will first use VergeIO as a disaster recovery option until they are ready to cut over to VergeOS completely.

the ROI of a VMware Exit

Please register for our one-slide webinar, which will include a live demonstration of a VMware to VergeOS migration. It is live on Thursday, March 16th, at 1:00 PM ET / 10:00 AM PT.

The Post VMware Exit – Experience

Another consideration when calculating the ROI of a VMware exit is what is the experience of operating post-VMware exit? Does the new infrastructure software include capabilities not available before? The reality is that most infrastructure alternatives are sold primarily on price rather than capabilities. These vendors scramble to market using unoptimized open-source code. As a result, the customer gains little in switching to the new platform.

VergeOS, A Superior Experience

VergeOS not only provides a dramatic reduction in costs, but it also provides superior value infrastructure capabilities. As stated above, the VergeOS can run more workloads on less hardware. It also can support mixed nodes, so you can support the needs of a variety of different workloads and can scale from one to one hundred nodes.

VergeOS also delivers a superior storage services portfolio, including:

  • Global Inline Deduplication
  • Silent Corruption Detection & Correction
  • WAN Optimized Remote Synchronization
  • Storage Multi-Tiering
  • High Performance – up to one million IOPS per node
  • AES 256-bit encryption
  • Instant, Immutable, Unlimited Snapshots & Cloning

VMware, without the introduction of NSX, provides little networking functionality beyond a virtual switch. VergeOS includes a full complement of networking capabilities, including:

  • Layer 2 and 3 networking
  • Firewall and DNS servers
  • Network Address Translation & Port Address Translation (NAT/ PAT)
  • Quality of Service (QOS)
  • Static Routing
  • DHCP (Client and Server)
  • Authoritative DNS
  • Port Mirroring (North/South) & (East/West)

An Exit Worth Taking

VergeOS is not only a way out of the uncertainty of VMware. It is a superior platform for your data center. It will dramatically lower today’s costs, extend the life of existing hardware for years, and better position you to adopt and adapt to future technology. At the same time, you will experience a massively simplified IT operations experience that is even superior to the public cloud. With VergeOS the ROI of a VMware exit is quick and long-lasting.

Next Steps

  • Register for our webinar to see a live migration of a VMware environment into VergeOS.
  • Subscribe to our tutorial on developing a VMware Exit Strategy.
  • Schedule a technical whiteboard session
  • Download a copy of VergeOS

Filed Under: Virtualization Tagged With: HCI, VMware

The HCI Disaster Recovery Problem

January 31, 2023 by George Crump Leave a Comment

While hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) catches the attention of many IT professionals, the HCI Disaster Recovery problem, while seldom talked about, could be its greatest weakness. Proper HCI protection and disaster recovery typically require a separate infrastructure with its own software and hardware. This requirement complicates a critical process, creating a high risk of failure while dramatically increasing costs.

What is the HCI Disaster Recovery Problem

Part of the HCI Disaster Recovery problem is that most data protection solutions have to protect HCI architectures as traditional three-tier architectures. They back up through the hypervisor and to a separate storage system. That separate storage system is often scale-out in nature, so you have nodes backing up nodes.

Disaster recovery requires the same HCI configuration in the remote site as in the primary site. Also, the deduplication capabilities that most HCI vendors provide are bolt-on, which they deliver years after the HCI software first comes to market. As a result, it can’t deduplicate across HCI clusters. If the organization has multiple HCI clusters in one or more locations, it must transmit all the data to the disaster recovery site.

The HCI Disaster Recovery Problem Triples Inefficiency

HCI is incredibly inefficient. The inefficiency is the result of forcing customers to expand with like nodes. If all you need is more processing power, you can’t easily add more advanced CPUs or GPUs to the existing cluster. Even if you use the same processor type, you can’t buy nodes that are primarily processors; you must buy additional storage to match the other nodes in the cluster.

Backing up an HCI architecture, because conventional wisdom is to back up to a scale-out storage system, means you are doubling the inefficiency of the infrastructure. That scale-out backup storage suffers from the same inefficiency as scale-out HCI except in reverse. With scale-out backup storage, you are dragging along, and paying for, more processing power than you probably need just to get capacity.

Making sure an HCI architecture is protected from disaster triples its inefficiency. Forcing identical nodes in the disaster recovery site means that the HCI solution duplicates the same inefficiency at the disaster recovery site as in the primary location. Suppose you are replicating the backup infrastructure in addition to the HCI infrastructure because you don’t trust HCI replication. In that case, you are quadrupling the cost of data protection and disaster recovery costs.

The HCI Ransomware Recovery Problem

Ransomware is another form of disaster. It is unique in that the data center is still operational, but users and applications are not. HCI also has a ransomware recovery problem. HCI solutions do not harden their software. Since most are mostly Software Defined Storage (SDS) solutions that claim to be HCI, they run as a virtual machine (VM) within a hypervisor like VMware or Hyper-V. They are at the mercy of that hypervisor’s ransomware hardening.

Running storage as a VM castrates a vital line of ransomware defense, snapshots. Recovering quickly from a ransomware attack requires frequent, immutable snapshots. Given the latest ransomware attack profiles, IT must retain these snapshots for months. Storage running as a VM suffers from the same virtualization tax as other VMs. As a result, they can only keep a few snapshots before needing to expel them for performance reasons.

Solving the HCI Disaster Recovery Problem

Solving the HCI disaster recovery problem requires rethinking HCI. First, the IT stack (compute, storage, networking) needs to be integrated, not layers. At VergeIO, we call this rotating the stack, which removes the layers and creates a cohesive data center operating system (DCOS), VergeOS. It is a single piece of software, not dozens. We call it Ultraconverged Infrastructure. Next week we’ll be hosting a live webinar that compares HCI to UCI. Register here.

Solve The HCI Disaster Recovery problem with replication, snapshots and deduplication.
Solve The HCI Disaster Recovery Problem

While we support external backup applications, VergeOS includes built-in data protection and replication capabilities. They, like everything else, are integrated into the core code, so they operate with minimal overhead. You can execute immutable snapshots frequently and retain those snapshots indefinitely without impacting performance.

VergeOS also supports different node types, so the disaster recovery site can use different hardware than the primary. Also, VergeOS supports global, inline deduplication so that if you are replicating from multiple sites to a central disaster recovery location, it only replicates the unique data from each site. With VergeOS, transfers are fast, and disaster recovery storage costs are negligible.

The HCI Disaster Recovery Problem Creates Compromise

Because of cost and complexity, many organizations compromise when establishing their disaster recovery site. The enforcement of like hardware doubles server acquisition costs, and the lack of efficient data storage can triple or more storage costs.

The most common compromise is using the backup infrastructure as the disaster recovery solution. Backup software can replicate and even deduplicate data, but when it stores that data on the remote site, it is in the backup software’s format. It isn’t operational. If there is a disaster, the organization must wait, potentially days or hours, for restore job completion before allowing access.

Using backup as the disaster recovery solution also makes testing and practicing the recovery process much more complicated and time-consuming. The result is less frequent testing and no practice. The reason most disaster recoveries fail is a lack of testing and experience.

Eliminating Disaster Recovery Compromise

VergeOS provides no-compromise disaster recovery. The costs at the disaster recovery site are easily controlled thanks to node flexibility and data deduplication. The data at the DR site is live and ready to instantiate at a moment’s notice.

Networking is also a source of disaster recovery failures. Misconfigurations, improper remapping, and incompatible hardware between locations can cause many problems. VergeOS integrates software-defined networking and alleviates these problems, ensuring that newly recovered data centers are easily accessible by users and applications.

Testing, thanks to our snapshot functionality, is also easy. Thanks to our Virtual Data Center (VDC) technology, a snapshot of an entire data center can be made in seconds. That snapshot can then be mounted for recovery testing purposes. Deduplication ensures that the only growth in capacity is changes made to the disaster recovery dataset while the test is executing.

Data protection and disaster recovery have been problematic since the dawn of the data center. Continuing to try the same old thing (replace backup software, replace backup storage, try to find a better replication solution, pray the network works) isn’t the answer. With VergeOS, we start at the source of the problem the production infrastructure itself.

Learn More:

  1. Register for our live webinar, “Beyond HCI — The Next Step in Data Center Infrastructure Evolution.” During the webinar, VergeIO’s Principal Systems Engineer, Aaron Reed, and I will compare HCI and UCI in-depth. I’m even going to talk Aaron into giving you a live demonstration of the solution of VergeOS in action.
  2. Subscribe to our Digital Learning Guide, “Does HCI Really Deliver?”
  3. Sign-up for a Test Drive – Try it yourself, and run our software in your labs.

Filed Under: Blog, HCI Tagged With: dataprotection, HCI, Hyperconverged, snapshots

The Full Value of Scale

January 25, 2023 by George Crump Leave a Comment

For data centers, realizing the full value of scale requires a single infrastructure that can scale in multiple dimensions and address multiple use cases. Customers today can select a legacy, single-dimension, scale-out strategy like hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). However, they then experience scale-out sprawl because they need a scale-out architecture for production applications, a scale-out architecture for unstructured data, and a scale-out architecture for data protection. These designs will never enable customers to benefit from the full value of scale.

As we discussed in our on-demand webinar, “How to Eliminate the Data Center Scale Problem,”, the solution is a single infrastructure, not multiple infrastructures. That infrastructure must scale in all three dimensions, not just “out.” It also must allow incremental adoption because most organizations won’t “clean sweep” their data centers.

The Full Value of Scaling Large Instead of Out

While hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) vendors claim to scale out, most customers find that they, for technical or practical reasons, can only “scale medium.” Despite claiming to converge virtualization, networking, and storage, most HCI solutions are software-defined storage (SDS) running as a virtual machine (VM). They are stacking the three tiers (compute, storage, networking) instead of converging them.

The Full Value of Scale: Delivering the Enterprise

For virtualization, these products typically force you to pay separately for a third-party hypervisor like VMware ESXi, or bundle an open-source version, with little to no optimization. When it comes to networking, most HCI solutions provide little to no functionality and instead rely on the often limited capabilities of the hypervisor. The result of borrowing and bundling code creates a burden on the infrastructure, which worsens as IT adds additional nodes. IT professionals refer to this overhead as the virtualization tax. As a result, most HCI infrastructures only support one workload and don’t typically scale that architecture beyond six to eight nodes.

Ultraconverged Infrastructure (UCI), instead of stacking layers of code on top of each other within each node, rotates the stack into a single layer, creating a cohesive piece of data center operating software. VergeOS, for example, is a UCI solution architected so that virtualization, networking services, and storage services are all integrated, almost eliminating the virtualization tax. UCI’s efficiency can scale to hundreds of nodes without wasting resources so that even the largest enterprise can consolidate all their workloads onto a single infrastructure.

Scaling large helps organizations realize the full value of scale by enabling organizations to keep the same infrastructure no matter how many new workloads the organization needs to support. It simplifies IT operations and dramatically lowers IT cost.

The Full Value of Scale: Delivering The Edge

The Full Value of Scale: Delivering the Edge

Only some organizations need massive scale, and even enterprises that do will have Edge locations and branch offices that need localized IT resources. Scaling small is a more significant challenge than scaling large. Mid-size data centers and branch offices often have a smaller IT team, sometimes a team of one. Edge locations are hard to get to and have an IT team of zero. In all cases, space is often limited, but high availability is often a mandate.

The “scale medium” HCI solutions often require three nodes. Overcoming the overhead caused by the virtualization tax requires that those nodes have powerful processors and high-performance storage, even though compute and storage performance requirements are modest. Mid-range processors and a mixture of flash and hard disk drives will meet the requirements of many of these environments. The legacy HCI node-similarity requirement forces customers into using high-end processors and flash-only configurations. The result is that HCI becomes very expensive for Server Rooms and Edge Computing.

UCI can scale small. IT can create a cluster with only one or two small nodes for high availability (H/A). The efficiency of VergeOS enables Edge Computing, especially when IT planners couple it with two mini-servers like Intel’s Next Unit of Computing (NUC). In the space of a shoebox, you can deliver Edge Computing power and consume less than 12 watts, and delivers more than enough performance for multiple workloads.

The Full Value of Scale: Delivering for Mid-sized data centers

For the Server Room use case, VergeOS can use two or three low-end to midrange servers, enabling you to consolidate all your workloads onto one infrastructure, eliminating dozens of extraneous software packages and processes.

Scaling small helps organizations realize the full value of scale by reducing the cost and complexity of managing Edge Compute. It also enables mid-sized data centers to keep pace with larger organizations even though they have much smaller IT teams. Whether you have hundreds of Edge data collection points or are an IT team of one, VergeOS can solve your virtualization, storage, networking, and data protection challenges.

The Value of Scaling Vertical

Vertically scaling your infrastructure is one of the essential requirements to realizing the full value of scale, but it is often lacking from HCI solutions. Most HCI solutions require that each additional node added to the cluster has similar processing power, IOPS performance, and storage capacity as the existing nodes. While it is true that some HCI vendors have a concept of a capacity node, that node often comes with ramifications. One vendor, for example, suggests turning off deduplication if you add a set of capacity nodes, which means you will need even more of them.

The Full Value of Scale: Delivering Workload Consolidation

Node similarity leads IT professionals only to use HCI for one specific workload. UCI is different in that it can support multiple nodes within the data center operating system (DCOS). A single environment can contain nodes with different processing capabilities from different manufacturers. It can even mix in nodes with Graphics Processing Units (GPU). Nodes can be storage performance focused with NVMe flash, and other nodes can be capacity focused with high-density but low-cost hard disk drives.

The mixture of nodes does not increase complexity. IT can organize nodes by their capabilities into specific clusters. The clusters are then seen through our Global Resource Pool. Using our Virtual Data Center (VDC) technology, an IT administrator can dedicate certain cluster types to particular VDCs, or the capabilities of a cluster can be made universally available to all VDCs. This is all easily done through the VergeOS dashboard.

A VDCs can be created for each workload type or set of workloads with a common resource requirement. For example, suppose you have a mission-critical performance-demanding application. In that case, the infrastructure must deliver consistent, high-performance; you can dedicate the resources from a specific high-performance storage cluster (NVMe Flash) to that VDC. The VDC can even be nested so that you can have a production instance, a development instance, and a QA instance of that application. Our deduplication and snapshots make this nesting practical because they eliminate redundant data.

The vertical dimension also helps organizations realize the full value of scale by doing something they may have thought impossible, complete workload consolidation. When looking at workload or even storage consolidation, IT planners worry about workload integrity, ensuring the workload will get the performance or capacity it needs when needed. With UCI, you can mix nodes and add specific resources for specific workloads ensuring consistent performance and happy users.

The Full Value of Scale: Deep

Scaling Deep is another dimension data centers need to extract the full value of scale. It ensures existing resources are almost entirely utilized before adding more nodes. While scaling large is vital, you only want to scale as large as you must and no further.

Scaling deep requires ensuring the vendor optimizes the software for the hardware it is managing. Delivering optimization while maintaining hardware abstraction requires very talented developers. It also needs to provide features like deduplication to ensure capacity efficiency. These optimizations require that the UCI vendor own the code and can get into the low levels of the software to make those optimizations. Vendors who borrow an off-the-shelf or open-source hypervisor don’t own the code to make the improvements if they want.

VergeIO’s developers have taken talent and ownership to an extreme. VergeIO not only owns the code and has very talented developers, and we created a specific programming language and development environment to get around the limitations of traditional programming stacks. It enables us to remain agile, even 12 years into the product’s maturity.

Scaling deeps helps organizations realize the full value of scale so they can slow the growth of IT spending. Most HCI solutions are less than 10% utilized, but these vendors continue to force their customers to add additional nodes to cover the virtualization tax.

How to Get from Many to One

Clearly, scale-out is not enough; data centers need the multi-dimensional scale that UCI provides. The vision of UCI is compelling, one data center operating system that replaces dozens of others while driving down the cost and complexity of IT.

Starting is simple, identify one workload whose infrastructure needs refreshing. Maybe it’s time to replace a SAN or NAS, or you are considering HCI and are looking for a more cost-effective and scalable alternative. Maybe you are a member of a small IT team with a small data center and are looking to simplify everything. Or You have an Edge Strategy that has stalled or never got off the ground.

You can also get an in-depth education into the VergeOS architecture with our Digital Learning Guide, “Understanding the VergeOS Architecture.“

All of these are great places to start with VergeIO. Want to learn how UCI can map into your infrastructure plans? Schedule a meeting with one of our technical specialists today.

Filed Under: Blog, HCI Tagged With: HCI, Hyperconverged, scale-out, VMware

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