VMware by Broadcom has been in the news a lot lately and it has mostly been negative press. We wrote about VMware by Broadcom back in February ourselves and stressed the need for patience due to the short notice changes and lack of available information. So, what is the status now that we are three months into the transition?
We have observed a number of issues that boil down to VMware by Broadcom becoming extremely difficult to work with as a partner and extraordinarily expensive for customers. When VMware by Broadcom executives are confronted about these issues, they essentially deny that there are any problems in the first place. A vast majority of VMware’s customers only generate a small percentage of their annually recurring revenue, so Broadcom wants to shed a bulk of those low revenue customers. If all or most of the features you use can be achieved with a vSphere Essentials or Standard license, your business is no longer appreciated. Broadcom is actively and intentionally working towards making VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF, subscription version of Enterprise Plus) the base, standard package including the elimination of any but the largest of VMware Cloud Provider partners.
If You’re Not One of VMware’s Top 2,000 Customers, What Options Do You Have?
Several. But one option stands out to us head and shoulders above the others for a typical, on-premises, high-availability cluster.
Scale Computing is a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solution vendor. The short, overly simplified explanation is that they are putting all the storage & compute resources into servers so you have a centrally managed virtualization environment that is comprised of pre-packaged blocks that can be individually added, removed, updated, or upgraded as needed. HPE had SimpliVity and Dell had VxRail, but those were VMware based offerings which VMware by Broadcom has all but killed by eliminating OEM partnerships and making the VMware licensing more expensive.
Scale Computing believes strongly in their four core values:
- Availability
- Scalability
- Simplicity
- Affordability
Availability & Scalability
Scale Computing tackles availability and scalability with their SC//HyperCore hypervisor which is based around the Red Hat KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) hypervisor engine. This open-source hypervisor engine is the same engine used by other solutions such as Red Hat Virtualization, Nutanix, Proxmox, and even Google Cloud. Scale Computing has some of their own special sauce in there including SCRIBE (Scale Computing Reliable Independent Block Engine), HEAT (HyperCore Enhanced Automated Tiering), and AIME (Autonomous Infrastructure Management Engine). Features like replication are built-in so you can replicate to other Scale Computing clusters or to SC//Platform Cloud Unity which is housed on a Google Cloud platform enabling to use the cloud as your DR site instead of investing in hardware, real estate, and licensing that might never get used.
Simplicity & Scalability
Scale Computing tackles Simplicity and Scalability with their SC//Fleet Manager. Fleet Manager allows you to manage multiple clusters in a single management interface. SC//HyperCore includes its own management interface for individual clusters and allows full functionality at that level. Fleet Manager takes things up a notch with multi-cluster functions like organization-wide updating, monitoring & alerting, and status dashboards.
Affordability & Simplicity
Lastly, Scale Computing tackles affordability and simplicity in multiple ways. There are no support or licensing tiers. Hardware is included with the SC//Platform and this is done by leveraging their partnerships with Intel, Dell, and Lenovo for their hardware options. This way, you get the benefits of enterprise level discounts on your hardware. This puts your support for the entire platform bundled into one invoice from one vendor for hardware and software. Obviously, this means this system is on a platform that has been thoroughly vetted by Scale Computing staff.
We have seen customers save tens of thousands of dollars on the 5-year costs for a 3-node Scale Computing solution versus a 2-node VMware Essentials+ cluster with an entry-level storage array like a Dell PowerVault or HPE MSA.
NOTE: Meeting must be booked on or before June 30th, 2024 to qualify.
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