TL;dr, if you’re not a huge enterprise, yes.
Amongst the IT industry in general, and virtualization specialists in particular, the caution with which they’ve viewed Broadcom’s acquisition has turned to disappointment if not anger.
Like many businesses, VMware earned about 80% of its revenue from about 20% of its customer base – the very large international enterprises. Broadcom has made the decision to focus solely on this 20% of customers, essentially abandoning the other 80%, leaving many with no clear path forward.
This can be seen quite clearly in the way that Broadcom has reorganized the VMware product portfolio.
VMware products have been switched from perpetual licenses to a subscription model. Many customers have stated that, for their specific needs, the subscription model is more expensive than their software licenses had been. While many other businesses have adopted the same or a similar approach, Broadcom has exacerbated this by its bundling of VMware products.
For many products, VMware vSAN among them, instead of being available as standalone products, they have been bundled into the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) suite. This presents a barrier for small and medium-sized businesses as most aren’t using – and are unlikely to adopt – many of the products in the suite. VCF is a full-featured set of products that work together to help customers build and manage their own software-defined data centers (SDDC).
The products included in the basic VCF package are:
- VMware SDDC Manager for cloud management and orchestration
- vSphere ESX hypervisor for virtual compute services
- vCenter Standard for management of virtual machines
- vSphere Kubernetes Service for those wanting to use containers
- vSAN for software-defined storage (SDS)
- VCF Operations Fleet Manager for management of multiple VCF environments
- VCF Operations Network Insight for network monitoring and troubleshooting
- VCF Operations HCX for the ability to move workloads between on-premises hosts and VMware Cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- VCF Automation to enable self-service of Kubernetes resources for infrastructure as a service (IaaS)
- NSX for virtual networks
- Data Services Manager
As you can see from the list above, VCF is a comprehensive suite of tools and services designed for globe-spanning enterprises running large private and hybrid cloud deployments across multiple physical data centers – something that the vast majority of the forgotten 80% of the VMware customer base aren’t doing at all.
Where to From Here?
Current vSAN customers who aren’t and won’t be using the VCF suite should be looking to migrate from vSAN to an alternative software-defined storage solution. Many are also looking to migrate away from VMware entirely and are exploring other hypervisor options such as Linux KVM.
It’s clear that customers using vSAN outside of VCF have only two options long-term – they can purchase subscriptions to the entire VCF suite, or migrate to another storage platform. At some point, standalone vSAN will no longer be supported.
StorPool’s software-defined storage solution provides a fully-managed high-performance infrastructure on which customers can run both VMware vSphere and KVM simultaneously, making it ideal for hypervisor migration for those who decide on going that route. You can learn more about the StorPool Storage solution on this page.