Given VMware's recent licensing changes, organizations must adapt their virtualization strategies to maintain cost efficiency and scalability. Optimizing existing VMware environments, considering migration from standalone vSphere to VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) using existing enterprise storage and embracing a multi-hypervisor or hybrid cloud approach are pivotal steps. Notably, VCF 5.2.1 introduced enhanced flexibility by allowing the use of alternative storage solutions beyond vSAN, which makes it easy for organizations to adopt the new licensing mechanism while using enterprise storage functionalities and continue to run in a seamless fashion.

ONTAP is the right platform for any hypervisor in on-premises or for any workload in the cloud. ONTAP supports all the prominent hypervisors in on-premises and have first party offering in each cloud supporting VMware cloud offerings and cloud native workloads. This enables organizations to handle the licensing change easily by navigating through the appropriate deployment model.

This paper outlines strategies for optimizing VMware deployments, evaluates multi-hypervisor adoption, details the migration of VMs from vSphere to VCF and migration of VMs to alternate hypervisors covering all available options.

Broadcom's acquisition of VMware has led to a significant shift in VMware's licensing model. The new approach is transitioning to a subscription-based pricing structure, which, while in line with industry trends, is expected to result in substantially higher costs. Here are two major points to keep in mind:

Subscription-Based Licensing: VMware is moving away from perpetual licenses to subscription-based models.

Per socket to core: The shift from per CPU to per core socket pricing indicates a significant change that could substantially increase costs.

NetApp storage solutions are at the forefront of providing solutions that empower and enable customers to take full advantage of all the benefits of a virtualized infrastructure. With NetApp solutions, customers can rapidly deploy comprehensive data management software delivering automation, efficiency, data protection and security capabilities while meeting any demanding performance needs. Combining ONTAP software with VMware vSphere allows to reduce host hardware and VMware licensing expenses, make sure data is protected at lower cost, and provide consistent high performance. Virtualized workloads are mobile.

Therefore, administrators use VMware Storage vMotion to move VMs across VMware Virtual Machine File System (VMFS), NFS, or vVols datastores, all residing on the same storage system and thus explore different storage approaches if using an All-Flash System or use the latest ASA models with SAN innovation for higher cost efficiency.

The ONTAP storage solution offers the following benefits:

As licensing changes loom, every organization is under the stress of potentially increased Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). A well-optimized VMware environment maximizes performance while controlling licensing expenses. This ensures effective resource management and capacity planning. With the right set of tools, quickly identify wasted or idle resources to reclaim the cores, thus reducing the core count which inturn reduces the overall licensing cost.

NetApp offers a powerful suite of tools to overcome these challenges, providing enhanced visibility, seamless integration, cost efficiency, and robust security. By using these capabilities, organizations can survive and even thrive during this disruption and be prepared for whatever other unforeseen challenges the future brings.

Note: Keep in mind, most organizations are already doing this as part of their cloud assessment, and it is the same processes and tools that helps in avoiding the cost panic in the on-premises world and save any immediate emotion enabled migration cost to alternate hypervisor.

With the release of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.2 comes the capability to convert existing vSphere infrastructure to VCF management domains and import additional clusters as VCF VI workload domains. Along with this VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) can now fully be run on NetApp storage platforms without the requirement to use vSAN (yes, all of this without vSAN). Converting a cluster, with an existing NFS or FC datastore running on ONTAP, involves integrating existing infrastructure into a modern private cloud, which means there is no need for vSAN.

This process benefits from the flexibility of NFS and FC storage, to ensure seamless data access and management. After a VCF management domain is established through the conversion process, administrators can efficiently import additional vSphere clusters, including those using NFS or FC datastores, into the VCF ecosystem. This integration not only enhances resource utilization but also simplifies the management of private cloud infrastructure, ensuring a smooth transition with minimal disruption to existing workloads.

If VMware Cloud Foundation is a greenfield installation (create a new vSphere infrastructure and Single Sign-On domain), Existing workloads running on older vSphere versions cannot be managed from Cloud Foundation.

The first step is to migrate current application VMs running on existing vSphere environments into Cloud Foundation. The migration path depends on the migration choices—live, warm, and cold—and by the version of any existing vSphere environments. The following are the options in the order of priority depending on the source storage.

The easiest method in most cases is to use Storage vMotion. The cluster should have access to both the new ONTAP SAN or NAS datastore and the storage you are migrating the VMs from (SAN, NAS, etc.). The process is simple:

vSphere will copy the files – VMX, NVRAM, VMDK(s), etc. – from the old storage to the ONTAP powered datastore. Note that vSphere will potentially be copying large amounts of data. This method does not require any downtime. The VMs continue to run as they are being migrated.

Other options include host-based migration, 3rd party replication to perform the migration.

NetApp offers an industry-leading, SaaS-based disaster recovery (DRaaS) solution that can significantly lower the costs and reduce complexity. There’s no need to acquire and deploy expensive alternative infrastructure.

Implementing disaster recovery through block-level replication from the production site to the disaster recovery site is a resilient and cost-effective method for safeguarding workloads against site outages and data corruption events, such as ransomware attacks. Using NetApp SnapMirror replication, VMware workloads running on on-premises ONTAP systems with NFS or VMFS datastores can be replicated to another ONTAP storage system located in a designated recovery datacenter where VMware is also deployed.

Use the BlueXP disaster recovery service, which is integrated into the NetApp BlueXP console wherein customers can discover their on-premises VMware vCenters along with ONTAP storage, create resource groupings, create a disaster recovery plan, associate it with resource groups, and test or execute failover and failback. SnapMirror provides storage-level block replication to keep the two sites up to date with incremental changes, resulting in a RPO of up to 5 minutes.

It is also possible to simulate DR procedures as a regular drill without impacting the production and replicated datastores or incurring additional storage costs. BlueXP disaster recovery takes advantage of ONTAP’s FlexClone technology to create a space-efficient copy of the VMFS datastore from the last replicated Snapshot on the DR site. Once the DR test is complete, customers can simply delete the test environment, again without any impact to actual replicated production resources.

When there is a need (planned or unplanned) for actual failover, with a few clicks, the BlueXP disaster recovery service will orchestrate all the steps needed to automatically bring up the protected virtual machines on designated disaster recovery site. The service will also reverse the SnapMirror relationship to the primary site and replicate any changes from secondary to primary for a failback operation, when needed. All of these can be achieved with a fraction of cost compared to other well-known alternatives.

Detecting ransomware as early as possible is crucial in preventing its spread and avoiding costly downtime. An effective ransomware detection strategy must incorporate multiple layers of protection at ESXi host and guest VM levels. While multiple security measures are implemented to create a comprehensive defense against ransomware attacks, ONTAP enables adding more layers of protection to the overall defense approach. To name a few capabilities, it starts with Snapshots, Autonomous Ransomware Protection, tamper-proof snapshots and so on.

Let’s look at how the above-mentioned capabilities work with VMware to protect and recover the data against ransomware. To protect vSphere and guest VMs against attacks, it is essential to take several measures including segmenting, utilizing EDR/XDR/SIEM for endpoints and installing security updates and adhering to the appropriate hardening guidelines. Each virtual machine residing on a datastore also hosts a standard operating system. Ensure enterprise server anti-malware product suites are installed and regularly updated on them which is an essential component of multi-layered ransomware protection strategy. Along with this, enable Autonomous Ransomware Protection (ARP) on the NFS volume powering the datastore. ARP leverages built-in on-box ML that looks at volume workload activity plus data entropy to automatically detect ransomware. ARP is configurable through the ONTAP built-in management interface or system Manager and is enabled on a per-volume basis.

As part of adding multiple layered approach, there is also a native built-in ONTAP solution for protecting unauthorized deletion of backup Snapshot copies. It is known as multi-admin verification or MAV which is available in ONTAP 9.11.1 and later. The ideal approach will be to use queries for MAV specific operations.

Every organization is evaluating a multi-hypervisor approach, which supports a dual or triple-vendor hypervisor strategy, thus strengthening their operational flexibility, mitigating vendor dependency, and optimizing the workload placement. Organizations then streamline multi-hypervisor management by leveraging interoperability, cost-effective licensing, and automation. ONTAP is the ideal platform for any hypervisor platform. Another key requirement in this approach is dynamic virtual machine mobility based on the SLAs and workload placement strategy.

Customer has 10000 VMs with a mix of windows and linux workloads. To optimize the licensing cost and simplify the future of virtualization infrastructure, multi hypervisor and vm placement strategy was important. They chose the VM strategy based on the workload criticality, performance requirement, hypervisor functionality and licensing cost.

The Tier 0 VMs were retained on VMware (1000 VMs) followed by Tier 1/Tier 2 moving to Hyper-V (5000 VMs). The rest 4000 VMs was moved to OpenShift virtualization (primarily Linux based VMs). This hybrid VM placement helped them in controlling the cost while retaining the control, process, tools and functionality.

The above is one example, however there are different permutations and combinations that can be applied at each application level to optimize the environment.

In the wake of the Broadcom acquisition, VMware customers are navigating a complex landscape of integration, performance optimization, and cost management. NetApp offers powerful suite of tools and capabilities to overcome these challenges, providing enhanced visibility, seamless integration, cost efficiency, and robust security. By using these capabilities, stay with VMware and optimize to survive and even thrive during the Broadcom disruption and be prepared for whatever other unforeseen challenges the future brings.

If moving to an alternative hypervisor platform is the desired choice, there are several robust alternatives to VMware that organization can consider for virtualization needs. Hyper-V, Proxmox, and KVM each offer unique advantages. To determine the best fit, evaluate factors such as budget, existing infrastructure, performance requirements, and support needs. No matter what hypervisor platform is selected, ONTAP is the ideal storage.