VMware migrations will be long, expensive, and risky, warns Gartner

If the changes Broadcom brought to VMware have you thinking of a move to an alternative virtualization platform, expect a long, costly, and risky project – and perhaps a longer, costlier, and riskier one if you put off pondering the move.

That’s the thrust of a new assessment titled “Estimating a Large-Scale VMware Migration” from by analyst firm Gartner, and the opinion of one of its authors – VP Analyst Michael Warrilow.

The assessment modelled the cost of migrating off VMware for an org that runs 2,000 or more VMs and at least 100 servers to host them and found projects will take 18 to 48 months. Each virtual machine will cost between $300 and $3,000 to migrate, if you engage external service providers.

Initial scoping alone will require seven to ten full time staff for a month. Technical evaluation of potential VMware replacements needs another six people for up to nine months. Planning and testing before a migration will vary depending on the complexity of your apps and infrastructure.

Warrilow said migrations will be complex because VMware users often mistakenly consider the Broadcom business unit first and foremost a supplier of virtualization products. He told The Register that orgs where multiple components of the VMware stack are present need to consider it a networking vendor first, a storage supplier second, a management tools provider third – and only then consider its role as a source of virtualization tech. That approach is necessary, he said, because migrating networks (and entangled security setups), storage (and associated disaster recovery rigs), and management tools is harder than shifting hypervisors.

“Migrating from VMware’s server virtualization platform would require untangling many aspects of these investments,” the Gartner document points out.

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Warrilow told The Register that VMware customers he speaks too are often yet to commence migration plans. “Everybody's asking what everybody else is doing, and everybody else is asking what everybody else is doing, so nobody's really doing anything,” he said.

That approach means he fears VMware users are going to waste 2025 waiting to watch their peers, and vendors who offer alternative virtualization stacks won’t get the orders they hoped to win.

The analyst counselled starting work on migration plans sooner rather than later, because the time required to make the move means most users will need to renegotiate licenses with Broadcom at least once before their project is completed as the chips-and-code company prefers two-or-three-year subscriptions. He fears Broadcom will hike prices even further in future, meaning delays that push users into a second round of license negotiations could face more expense.

Warrilow joked that VMware is “the new mainframe”, status that denotes its likely persistence in many orgs as infrastructure dedicated to applications that are too hard, or too risky, to re-platform.

Broadcom argues its flagship VMware Cloud Foundation suite is much more than that and offers adopters the chance to build private clouds that are more efficient and cost-effective than using public clouds. ®