VMware

November 7, 2025 by George Crump

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

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

Why Universities Are Leaving VMware

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

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

What Higher Education Cannot Compromise

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

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

Why Universities are leaving VMware for VergeOS

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

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

Universities are leaving VMware for better data resiliency

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

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

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

The Pfeiffer University Exit Strategy

Universities are leaving VMware with a solid roadmap

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

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

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

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

Universities are leaving VMware to Reuse Servers

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

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

Universities are leaving VMware for AI Readiness

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

A Practical Exit Roadmap

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

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

The Path Forward

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

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

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

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

November 4, 2025 by George Crump

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

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

True ransomware recovery depends on three elements working in concert:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Downside of Immutable Protection

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

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

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

Immutable Protection IS Necessary

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

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

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

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

Immutable Protection – Head-to-Head Comparison

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Final Word on “Ransomware’s Kryptonite”

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

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

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

On-Demand Now

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

October 28, 2025 by George Crump

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

How Infrastructure Software Limits Scale

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

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

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

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

Layers Create Infrastructure Software Limits

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

Legacy software limits infrastructure scale

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

Solving Infrastructure Software Limits: A Single Codebase

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

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

VergeOS Eliminates Infrastructure Software Limits

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

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

Complete Infrastructure Services in One Platform

Eliminating Enterprise AI Deployment Barriers

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

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

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

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

Virtual Data Centers and Infrastructure-Wide Tagging

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

Legacy software limits infrastructure scale but VergeOS doesn't

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

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

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

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

Scale Needs Integration, Not Integration Projects

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

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

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

The Cost of Infrastructure Software Limits

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

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

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

Proving Infrastructure Software Limits Don’t Exist

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

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

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

Don’t Settle for Infrastructure Software Limits

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

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

Filed Under: Virtualization Tagged With: IT infrastructure, VMware

October 7, 2025 by George Crump

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 7, 2025

Pfeiffer University Selects VergeIO to Replace VMware, Cutting IT Costs by 85%

Ann Arbor, MI — October 7, 2025 — VergeIO, the leading VMware alternative, today announced that Pfeiffer University, a private nonprofit liberal arts institution in North Carolina, has modernized its IT infrastructure with VergeOS. The transition reduced Pfeiffer’s infrastructure costs by approximately 85% while providing students with real-world learning opportunities.

Pfeiffer University, with over 135 years of history, is recognized for its personalized education and hands-on learning approach. When VMware licensing changes, rising costs, and poor support responsiveness threatened to overwhelm the small IT department, CIO Ryan Conte and his team began evaluating alternatives.

“VMware wasn’t calling us back,” said CIO Ryan Conte. “VergeOS was the only product I looked at that didn’t need hardware. Others told me to buy new, but I had good servers with life left in them. VergeOS, let me use them.”

VMware Challenges

VMware’s move to per-core subscriptions increased Pfeiffer’s projected costs to $35,000–$45,000 annually, compounded by the elimination of discounts offered to higher education institutions. In addition, MSPs pushed for hardware refreshes or cloud migrations that would have cost Pfeiffer $100,000 to $200,000, a significant capital expense for most private nonprofit institutions.

Why VergeIO

CIO Ryan Conte and his team evaluated public cloud services, scaled-down VMware approaches, and other on-premises platforms, but all fell short of expectations.

VergeIO stood out because it:

Supported reuse of HP Gen9/10/11 and Dell servers, allowing the university to repurpose existing equipment.
Combined virtualization, storage, networking, and data protection into a single platform.
Enabled in-house migration of 30–40 VMs without professional services.
Delivered built-in disaster recovery, replication, and ransomware protection, eliminating the need for a separate $20,000–$30,000 backup project.
Provided rapid support response times.

Three senior CIS students — Mathius Dessureau, Jason Giesbrecht, and Justin Giesbrecht — played a pivotal role in Pfeiffer’s transition from VMware to VergeOS. They conducted a comparative analysis, participated in the VergeOS proof of concept, and supported its implementation. Their contributions not only advanced the project but also reinforced Pfeiffer’s culture of hands-on learning, providing them with valuable real-world experience that will benefit their careers.

“Pfeiffer University’s project is a great example of how VergeOS empowers smaller IT teams to do more with less. By reusing hardware, integrating students into the process, and consolidating core IT functions, they achieved dramatic cost savings and improved resilience. This is exactly the kind of outcome VergeIO was designed to deliver,” said Jason Yaeger, SVP of Engineering, VergeIO.

Results

By adopting VergeOS, Pfeiffer avoided costly hardware refreshes, improved resiliency, and modernized its IT foundation. The project reduced projected infrastructure costs by 85% compared to VMware, aligning with the university’s mission to combine education with real-world experience.

The Pfeiffer journey away from VMware is documented in the case study here

About Pfeiffer University

Pfeiffer University is a private nonprofit liberal arts institution with campuses in Misenheimer, Charlotte, and Albemarle, North Carolina. With an 11:1 student-to-faculty ratio and a mission rooted in service and leadership, Pfeiffer combines academic rigor with practical experience to prepare students for success.

About VergeIO

VergeIO is the leading VMware alternative. Its product, VergeOS, is an ultraconverged infrastructure (UCI) platform that unifies virtualization, storage, networking, AI, and data protection into a single unified software codebase, running on commodity x86 hardware. Organizations use VergeOS to reduce costs, simplify operations, and ensure resiliency while avoiding vendor lock-in.

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

Filed Under: Press Release Tagged With: Alternative, Customer Success, VMware

September 23, 2025 by George Crump

Modernizing VDI and infrastructure requires looking beyond silos. Too often, IT leaders view a VMware exit as a hypervisor issue alone or consider VDI in isolation as a desktop project. Both perspectives miss the larger opportunity. Rising costs, tighter licensing terms, and fragmented management show that desktops and infrastructure are inseparable parts of the same challenge.

Reconsidering VDI makes sense in this context. Compliance, ransomware, and AI data governance all drive the need for centralized desktops, but the real value comes when VDI is addressed as part of a broader consolidation effort. By unifying desktops, servers, storage, and networking, organizations cut costs, reduce operational drag, and prepare for a future where governance, resiliency, and private AI must be delivered from the same architecture.

VAR solution architects can guide IT professionals through this shift, reframing VDI not as an endpoint but as a catalyst for infrastructure-wide modernization.

VDI as the Pressure Point

VDI shows pain fast. It faces users directly. As a result, performance issues and rising costs draw attention quickly. Traditional platforms built on multiple consoles and back-end dependencies create complexity and inflate expense.

When IT teams move to replace VDI, they often uncover a larger problem: fragmentation across desktops, servers, storage, and networking. Treating VDI as a standalone issue only delays the modernization that consolidation delivers.

Reconsidering VDI in a Consolidation Strategy

Many organizations ruled out VDI years ago as too costly or complex. That decision fit the time, but conditions have shifted. In a broader modernization strategy, VDI deserves a second look.

Drivers now extend beyond cost. Compliance and security mandates demand stronger control over user access and data handling. Rising ransomware threats make centralized desktops with consistent protection more attractive than scattered endpoints. Emerging AI projects raise data sovereignty concerns. Training or prompting AI models with organizational data requires internal processing, not exposure to public cloud services.

Reintroducing VDI as part of infrastructure consolidation aligns user access with the same architecture that runs servers, storage, and networking. This approach simplifies security, strengthens compliance, and positions the organization for a future where governance and AI readiness intersect.

Fragmentation Drives Cost and Risk

Running desktops, servers, storage, and networking as separate projects creates duplication and inefficiency. Each system brings its own licenses, contracts, and management tools. Vendors often trade blame during troubleshooting, slowing resolution.

Fragmentation inflates operating costs and drags IT response. The extra budget spent on silos becomes a “fragmentation tax” that drains resources from modernization projects.

Modernizing VDI and infrastructure as the Smarter Strategy

Modernizing VDI and infrastructure together eliminates the duplication and inefficiency that silos create. A unified platform removes overlapping systems, merges licensing into one model, and provides a single management plane for desktops, servers, storage, and networking.

Consolidation reduces software spend, shortens the learning curve for IT staff, and strengthens resiliency through integrated data protection. Organizations gain a simpler, more predictable environment that supports current workloads and prepares for private AI.

VAR solution architects expand their role with this strategy. The conversation shifts from tactical fixes to strategic modernization, creating larger opportunities and deeper customer relationships.

Fragmentation vs. Consolidation at a Glance

Factor	Fragmented Infrastructure	Consolidated Infrastructure (VergeOS + Inuvika + Cirrus Data)
Licensing Model	Per-core, per-user, multiple vendor renewals	Straightforward per-server + concurrent-user licensing
Management	4–6 consoles across desktops, servers, storage, networking	Single management plane for desktops and infrastructure
Operational Overhead	30–50% of IT time on troubleshooting and integration	Reduced admin effort; IT focuses on strategic projects
Resiliency & Protection	Disjointed backup and DR across silos	Integrated resiliency and protection across all workloads
Cost Trajectory	Increasing 60% or more, year on year	Predictable costs with extended hardware lifecycles
Future Readiness (AI, etc.)	Limited support; data risk in public clouds	Built-in private AI inferencing within secure infrastructure

Outcomes That Matter to Organizations

Modernizing VDI and infrastructure via consolidation delivers value across industries, even though each faces different pressures.

In education, universities have reduced “computer lab sprawl” by virtualizing applications and enabling student-device access, shrinking both the number and size of labs. The University of Massachusetts Lowell found utilization as low as 30% in some labs and cut costs by shifting to VDI (EdTech Magazine). Virtual desktops also lower maintenance and staffing needs while aligning licensing with fluctuating student populations.

In healthcare, enterprise VDI delivers 99.9% uptime for clinical desktops. Unified architectures prevent outages common in siloed hardware and provide secure, consistent access to patient data.

SMBs, caught between enterprise demands and enterprise pricing, are turning to consolidation. 95% of IT leaders plan vendor consolidation, with 80% citing the need to reduce point solutions (CIO). Companies that consolidate cut up to 20% of operational costs, extend hardware lifecycles, and simplify vendor management.

Across all sectors, modernizing VDI and infrastructure lowers cost, improves service delivery, and prepares IT for future projects.

Modernizing VDI and Infrastructure Inuvika, VergeIO, and Cirrus Data

Consolidation requires more than swapping point products. It demands platforms designed to unify. VergeOS provides that foundation by combining server virtualization, storage, networking, and resiliency in one code base. It replaces loosely integrated stacks with one consistent architecture and a straightforward licensing model. VergeOS licenses per server, regardless of CPUs or cores, giving organizations predictable costs as hardware evolves.

Inuvika complements this foundation with a Linux-based VDI platform that eliminates Windows Server back ends. Its concurrent-user model fits actual usage patterns, and its lightweight footprint makes deployment simple.

VergeOS now integrates AI into the infrastructure. Organizations deliver full inferencing capabilities to virtual desktops while keeping data private. Industries with strict sovereignty requirements can run AI internally without exposure to external cloud services.

Cirrus Data extends the strategy with efficient data mobility. IT teams migrate workloads from multiple platforms into a VergeOS cluster without extended downtime or high risk. VAR solution architects present customers with a clear, practical path to unification instead of a disruptive overhaul.

Together, VergeIO, Inuvika, and Cirrus Data modernize VDI and infrastructure as part of one unified strategy. IT professionals replace fragmentation with a single architecture, simplify licensing, and prepare for secure AI adoption.

How Do You Know You’re Ready for Modernizing VDI and infrastructure at the Same Time?

Reintroducing or modernizing VDI often signals more than a desktop change. It marks a review of the entire infrastructure. The key question is whether the current environment can deliver desktops, workloads, and applications securely from one platform.

Clear signals include rising licensing costs, compliance demands that outpace endpoint controls, or ransomware exposing weaknesses in scattered systems. The growth of AI adds urgency, as private inferencing requires both secure VDI and integrated infrastructure.

VAR solution architects can use these questions to uncover fragmentation, and IT professionals can use them to assess readiness. In either case, the answer points to treating VDI as part of a wider consolidation plan.

Modernizing VDI and infrastructure: Readiness Assessment

Whether you’re looking to modernize existing VDI, exit current solutions, or reconsider VDI after dismissing it previously, these questions will help you determine if consolidation is the right strategy for your organization.

Current VDI Users – Should You Consolidate or Exit?

Are your VDI licensing costs increasing faster than your user growth?
Do you manage more than three separate platforms just to deliver desktops and applications?
Are you spending more than 30% of your IT time troubleshooting integration issues between VDI and infrastructure systems?
Has your current VDI vendor changed licensing terms or roadmap direction in ways that concern you?

Organizations Without VDI – Is It Time to Revisit?

Have compliance requirements (HIPAA, SOX, GDPR) become more stringent since you last evaluated VDI?
Are ransomware concerns highlighting the vulnerability of scattered endpoints across your organization?
Do you need to support AI initiatives while keeping organizational data internal and secure?
Are remote work demands outpacing what traditional endpoint management can deliver?

Universal Consolidation Readiness Indicators

Do you currently pay multiple vendors for infrastructure services (servers, storage, networking, desktops)?
Has your total IT licensing spend increased by more than 20% over the past two years without corresponding gains in capability?
Are you planning major infrastructure refresh cycles in the next 12–18 months?
Do different departments manage their own IT relationships, creating silos and duplicate spending?

If you answered “yes” to three or more questions in any category, infrastructure consolidation—with VDI as a catalyst—deserves serious consideration. The timing and technology landscape have likely shifted enough to make what seemed impractical before into a strategic advantage today.

Ready to see how these solutions would fit into your environment? Schedule a strategic planning session to walk through a virtual whiteboard overview, demonstrating how VergeOS, Inuvika, and Cirrus Data would modernize your infrastructure and deliver the benefits outlined in this post.

Register for the Infrastructure Masterclass

Thursday, September 25th delivers a two-part masterclass in consolidation with two VergeIO webinars built to give IT professionals and VAR solution architects a complete view of modernization. Together, they provide a buy-one-get-one-free opportunity to understand how desktops, workloads, and AI-ready infrastructure fit into a single strategy.

The first event is:

Infrastructure + VDI Replacement: The Complete Partner Opportunity
📅 Thursday, September 25, 2025
🕐 10:00 AM ET

This session targets VAR solution architects and shows how modernizing VDI and infrastructure can lower costs, strengthen security, and simplify operations. It will cover how to position modernization strategies, expand engagements, and grow recurring revenue. IT professionals are certainly welcome to attend and will gain insight into how desktops and infrastructure operate together in practice. The session also features CCSI, a cloud service provider running VergeOS and Inuvika in production, demonstrating their live environment and outcomes.

Later in the day, VergeIO will host:

After the VMware Exit – How to Consolidate, Repatriate, and Prepare for AI
📅 Thursday, September 25, 2025
🕐 1:00 PM ET

This session invites everyone, speaking to both IT professionals and VAR solution architects. It explains why only treating the VMware exit as a hypervisor swap creates sprawl and complexity. Experts will demonstrate how full consolidation, repatriation of workloads from a public cloud, and preparation of environments for private AI all integrate into a single strategy. Attendees will see how a universal migration path and a unified infrastructure platform cut costs, simplify operations, and prepare for the future.

Together, these two webinars provide the complete picture: desktops and applications in the first session, consolidation and AI readiness in the second. Attending both delivers unmatched guidance and real-world proof in one day.

Conclusion

IT professionals face pressures that extend across desktops and infrastructure. Rising costs, rigid licensing, compliance demands, and growing security threats all point to one issue: fragmentation. Treating VDI as an isolated project delays progress. The smarter move is to use VDI modernization as the catalyst for consolidation that unifies desktops, servers, storage, networking, and AI.

For IT professionals, consolidation creates a predictable, secure, and resilient environment that supports both current and future needs. For VAR solution architects, it creates opportunities to lead larger, more strategic engagements and replace transactional deals with long-term modernization plans.

Filed Under: VDI Tagged With: Alternative, IT infrastructure, VDI, VMware

September 22, 2025 by George Crump

As enterprises plan their VMware exit, one of the biggest risks is falling into the hypervisor sprawl trap. The hypervisor sprawl trap is the cycle where organizations replace VMware with multiple hypervisors or cloud services for specific use cases, creating fragmented operations, higher costs, and diluted expertise instead of true simplification.

The reality is that many enterprises run more than one hypervisor, even more if you factor in public cloud use. This mix is manageable for now, but Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware is forcing more organizations to reevaluate their strategies. If the response is treated as a quick hypervisor swap, it may potentially lead to the addition of more hypervisors.

The wiser course is to view the VMware transition as an opportunity to simplify complexity. The goal should not be a one-for-one hypervisor trade but the adoption of a unified infrastructure platform that integrates virtualization, storage, networking, and protection. A single operating model reduces cost, simplifies operations, and creates a foundation for private AI.

How the Hypervisor Sprawl Trap is Sprung

The hypervisor sprawl trap rarely arrives in one step. It builds in layers.

The core data center adopts a hypervisor because it is less expensive than VMware and has near feature parity.
Edge and ROBO groups want to adopt lightweight KVM builds for small deployments because the core selection is too “heavy.”
AI teams want to experiment with GPU-focused variants because the core selection has weak or expensive GPU support.
Business Unit Managers approve cloud migrations to speed the deployment of new applications because the core selection is too complex.

Each decision makes sense individually, but together they create a fractured environment that is harder to manage and more expensive to run.

The Cost of The Hypervisor Sprawl Trap

The first phase of the hypervisor sprawl trap can appear to save money. A “free” hypervisor delays a license renewal. A cloud migration shifts capital expense into operating expense. Those savings are short-lived, and the cost of falling into the hypervisor sprawl trap soon becomes obvious. Each new hypervisor introduces its own patch cycle, interface, and failure model. Training grows broader, but skills become shallow. Monitoring, backup, and automation tools multiply. Disaster recovery plans diverge, and testing becomes longer and less predictable.

The use of the Cloud compounds the hypervisor sprawl trap. Lift-and-shift projects rarely eliminate on-premises complexity. They add monthly expenses and force IT to maintain separate operational silos. Edge and ROBO hypervisors create their own islands of management. Instead of simplifying the environment, sprawl increases both direct cost and hidden overhead.

Over five years, the total cost of a hypervisor swap mentality can exceed even VMware’s high licensing costs while leaving IT with weaker recovery capabilities and higher operational risk.

The Better Path: Infrastructure Consolidation

Broadcom’s actions are a forcing function. Enterprises can either fall into the hypervisor sprawl trap or set a clearer goal. The right objective is complete consolidation under one infrastructure-wide operating model that spans the core data center, private AI, edge, venues, and remote offices. Storage, networking, and protection must be part of that model.

A single infrastructure platform restores consistency. Incident response improves when all workloads are managed through one console. Disaster recovery becomes more reliable when there is one failover pattern. Compliance checks are faster when policies are enforced consistently across the environment. Teams deepen their expertise because they are not spread across competing tools. Cloud use becomes tactical and deliberate rather than a default escape from licensing costs.

Start with a Universal Migration Capability

Migration from VMware, Hyper-V, KVM variants, and cloud instances should be part of IT’s core capabilities, not added later. The majority of enterprises are living with degrees of fragmentation. The right move is to reverse it.

A universal migration tool makes this process a repeatable practice for IT. Platforms such as Cirrus Data provide the ability to move workloads from VMware, Hyper-V, KVM variants, and public cloud with minimal disruption, which is the first step in avoiding the hypervisor sprawl trap. They manage bandwidth, schedule cutovers, and create audit trails. With tools like these, migration becomes a permanent capability rather than a special project, making it possible to unwind sprawl when it begins to form.

Plan a series of consolidation waves. Begin with workloads that are lower risk but generate high administrative costs. Use them to prove migration and rollback processes, and to refine team procedures. With each wave, expand to higher-value workloads and remove duplicate tools. Cloud workloads should be treated with the same rigor. SaaS adoption will remain, but many lift-and-shift VMs are better brought back into the consolidated platform when contract terms permit.

A universal migration capability is essential because consolidation only works when migrations can move workloads into the chosen destination platform quickly, safely, and at scale.

VergeOS: The Universal Destination

As migration tools provide the means to reverse the hypervisor sprawl trap, so VergeOS provides the destination. The majority of VMware alternatives re-package KVM and expect IT to fill the gaps. Although VergeOS is KVM-based, it removes those gaps by going a step further and integrating virtualization (VergeHV), storage (VergeFS), networking (VergeFabric), and AI (VergeIQ) into a unified code base. The result is a hardware-neutral, efficient, high performance environment designed to extend the life of current hardware while increasing selection flexibility in the future.

Workloads from VMware, Hyper-V, KVM distributions, and cloud services can all be hosted on the same platform. Management takes place through one interface. Data reduction is applied across the stack, cutting I/O and bandwidth. High availability, immutable recovery points, and consistent networking policies are built into the software.

Together, Cirrus Data provides the universal migration capability, and VergeOS delivers the unified destination. This combination makes it possible to eliminate sprawl permanently rather than only trading one hypervisor for another.

To see this partnership in action register for our live webinar “After the VMware Exit: How to Consolidate, Repatriate, and Prepare for AI.”

The result is true infrastructure consolidation. One operating model spans the data center, edge, AI, venues, and remote offices. Teams train on one system, gaining depth instead of spreading thin. Costs track with hardware rather than feature packs or add-ons. VergeOS turns the VMware transition into a permanent infrastructure upgrade rather than a short-term trade.

Escaping The Hypervisor Sprawl Trap Permanently

Enterprises operate with more than one hypervisor, and the VMware disruption threatens to expand that sprawl. Deploying different hypervisors for edge, AI, and ROBO workloads increases complexity, and cloud lift-and-shift projects make the problem worse. The better answer is infrastructure consolidation. A universal migration tool, such as Cirrus Data, provides the means, and VergeOS provides the destination.

Enterprises should resist the temptation to treat the VMware exit as only a hypervisor swap and instead look for a unified infrastructure-wide operating platform. The outcome is lower cost, stronger expertise, and a single platform ready to support the next generation of workloads, including private AI. After the VMware exit, the goal is not to manage sprawl. The goal is to eliminate it.

The choice is clear: consolidate now with a universal migration path and a unified infrastructure platform, or carry the cost of sprawl into the future. Schedule a technical whiteboard session to dive deep into the VergeOS architecture.

Filed Under: VMwareExit Tagged With: IT infrastructure, VMware