Should You Stay with VMware or Change Virtualization Solutions?

Many organizations now understand what their VMware renewal pricing looks like and are starting to wonder what options they have. The goal of this blog is to help provide you with some very generalized guidance to help your organization decide whether to change and, if so, what solutions should be considered. The rankings here are subjective and only intended to give you an idea of how these solutions compare to each other. This is not an objective ranking system based on rigorous feature testing, actual configurations/quotes, using scorecards like a Gartner Magic Quadrant nor is it a popular vote from a user community like Gartner Peer Reviews.

How Are We Defining the Criteria for This Matrix?

These are all representative of an offering for the mid-market which we are loosely defining as small enterprise or larger SMB. Roughly 250-5,000 employees. If you are a large enterprise, you already have people to answer these questions. If you’re a small business, you probably don’t need, and can’t afford, all the bells & whistles.

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  Cost
  Primarily includes the licensing and support for the solution. We are not including secondary costs like education or hardware since that will vary widely, but we will take note where hardware costs may be important to consider.

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  Complexity/Ease of Use
  Represents the learning curve if an average virtualization administrator/engineer will be completely responsible for the environment, have been in the industry for 5-10 years, and has never used that particular solution. Higher learning curves probably mean at least some formal education programs/classes, specialty software, and/or advanced services (not standard vendor support) may be required to adequately maintain the environment.

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  Industry Interoperability
  Represents the ease of finding other vendors whose solutions will integrate with this one specifically and natively. This doesn’t mean you can’t find other vendors with solutions that will work. It just means there may need to be manual workarounds, custom scripting, and/or not being able to utilize specific features.

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  Features
  Represents the number of substantive features. Generally speaking, more features mean more complexity. The more there is to configure, the more settings have to be accounted for during any update, configuration change, and/or troubleshooting scenario.

Let’s Get to It

The circles in the below table are values based on a scale from low to high. One circle being the lowest value, and four circles being the highest value.

Let’s introduce you to the offerings just in case you aren’t familiar with them and make sure everyone understands which ones are apples, oranges, pears, and/or bananas.

VMware VCF
This is the proverbial 800-pound gorilla. Founded in 1998, VMware has been the leader in x86 virtualization for longer than any other offering on this list. VMware’s recent acquisition by Broadcom has changed their corporate focus to be on large enterprise customers with hybrid cloud environments. We are talking about the core product offering here, vSphere. VMware vSphere now comes in 4 subscription editions and we’re talking about vSphere Cloud Foundation (VCF) which is the new version of what used to be called Enterprise Plus. We’re not referring to any integrated OEM offerings like Dell’s VxRail, Cisco HyperFlex, and/or HPE SimpliVity. VMware is not in the hardware business, and you will always need to find your hardware somewhere else.

Scale Computing SC//Platform
Scale Computing has not had a strong marketing presence, but they have been in the hyperconverged space since 2008. Scale Computing’s primary focus is on ease of use for the distributed enterprise environments. The award-winning SC//Platform core is based on two products:

Scale Computing is only supported on the hardware that comes from them and is usually Lenovo and Intel hardware. That may change in the future but, for now, you just buy your SC//Platform and your network switches.

Microsoft Azure Stack HCI
Microsoft released Hyper-V later than VMware vSphere and has been trying to play catchup ever since. Azure Stack HCI is primarily focused on hybrid cloud environments. Azure Stack HCI still uses Hyper-V as the hypervisor engine, but the management agent connects to Azure and allows administrators to manage the environments via Azure. This allows for a lot more management functionality including the ability to move workloads into Azure. Azure Stack HCI uses the Azure Stack Operating System which is conceptually similar to the old Hyper-V Server Operating System. This offering does not include any hardware but there are some integrated OEM offerings that do.

Nutanix
Founded in 2009, Nutanix has been a leader in the in the hyperconverged space for many years as well. Nutanix primarily targets large enterprises with highly centralized computing environments. Their management platform can sit on top of other hypervisors like VMware vSphere and Hyper-V, but they also have their own called the Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) based around the open-source Linux KVM hypervisor engine. Nutanix has a lot of optional add-ons beyond just the core AHV and the management console, Nutanix Central. It is hard to do a direct comparison because Nutanix doesn’t have a bundle and there are a lot of products. Nutanix probably needs about 5-6 of their products to do exactly what VCF can do. Part of the strength of Nutanix offerings now is being able to pick and choose. Nutanix AHV can be installed on a number of platforms, or you can purchase their hardware appliances as part of the solution. Their hardware appliances are generally SuperMicro.

Proxmox VE
Proxmox was founded in 2005 but didn’t release their first version of Proxmox Virtual Environment (VE) until 2008. Proxmox VE is primarily targeting “simple” environments that we now consider basic virtualization environments. Proxmox VE is based entirely on open-source components like the same Linux KVM used by Scale Computing and Nutanix but also using technology like Ceph Storage Cluster. Proxmox specializes in supporting open-source technology at an enterprise level. Proxmox prides itself on using its enterprise grade software development teams to support their customers while also providing updates back to the open-source community and projects they utilize. They have multiple support levels, but Standard is needed to match the 24/7/4-hour response level of the other offerings. Their offerings do not include any hardware, but they are based on the Debian GNU/Linux kernel and Proxmox VE code is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3.

Microsoft Hyper-V
We thought it was important to differentiate Azure Stack HCI from Hyper-V. This solution targets the simpler environments as well. With Windows Server Datacenter edition and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM), a lot of management functionality is presented, and the same core hypervisor features are present, but the price also drops. Since most organizations need Windows Server Datacenter anyway in order to license the guest Operating Systems, the only real cost difference becomes SCVMM making this a very inexpensive offering.

Public Cloud IaaS
For comparison sake, we are also throwing in the generic, averaged, Infrastructure-as-a-Service offerings from Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. In the fruit bowl that is on-premises virtualization, these offerings are a green bean casserole or tater tot hotdish. We are trying to make this semi-realistic thinking about the dozen or so features/functions that would be line items on an invoice to be comparable, but these are not at the same end of the buffet table. We just know that, when looking at all these offerings, someone on the management team who doesn’t understand the underlying technology is going to ask something like, “why don’t we just move everything to the cloud?” so we thought it would simplify a lot of conversations if we put it in here.

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