Reduce VMware exposure with four strategic moves: assess workloads, adopt hybrid virtualization, utilize HPE Morpheus Software, and plan migration effectively ahead.

Changing licensing terms and increasing costs downstream from Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware aren’t breaking news. But there’s still plenty of confusion about the right response. And while the two extremes—Exit immediately and completely or sigh deeply and try to carry on—are equally unrealistic, the space in the middle presents ample room for interpretation and not a lot of clarity.

Deciding on your approach means taking a step back—not the easiest thing when you’re facing third-party disruption. The nature of your workloads is likely the most important factor in setting your strategy, but a dispassionate assessment should also take into account your team’s capability, your level of urgency (for instance, are you under hypervisor contract renewal pressure with a hard deadline?), your organization’s scale, your application stack, your budget, and your risk tolerance.

Through the HPE Services team, we’ve worked with scores of organizations at every scale to help them navigate the transformed virtualization landscape. This post will lay out some of the key things we’ve learned through those engagements and offer some field-tested advice for leaders charged with setting a go-forward strategy.

First move: Deploy HPE Morpheus Software

Regardless of the rationalization strategy you ultimately settle on, you’re going to need visibility and capability: a clear line of sight into your virtualized environment, and a streamlined, efficient way to manage those resources. HPE Morpheus Enterprise Software is the industry’s leading platform for exactly that. It’s available in two different configurations, depending on the scale and complexity of your environment.

• HPE Morpheus Software—VM essentials
• HPE Morpheus Software—enterprise

Getting HPE Morpheus Software installed and deployed across your existing environment, and getting used to using it as your management tool, gives you time to sort out your migration strategy. And crucially, it incorporates the migration to, and the operation of, multiple hypervisors, with support for the VMware ESXi hypervisor and the kernel-based HPE HVM hypervisor built in. With HPE Morpheus Software, your transformed virtualized environment can include VMware and the kernel-based HPE HVM hypervisors, with seamless provisioning, deployment, and management through a single interface.

Second move: Consider your workloads

I mentioned up front that a full exit from VMware—the imagined satisfaction of a full rip and replace—isn’t a realistic outcome, and the nature of the workloads running on your VMs is the main reason why. Some workloads can’t move; others really shouldn’t. Most virtualized environments have plenty of easily achievable migration candidates without tackling the hard cases: the workloads that either can’t move or really shouldn’t.

Let’s take a look at some of these high-gravity workloads and situations:

• End-of-life workloads probably aren’t worth migrating—if you know it’s going away in 18 months or fewer, leave it be. You can reclaim the capacity when it’s gone.
• Latency-sensitive workloads with tricky placement rules (such as optimized DRS affinity and anti-affinity rules, custom resource pools, and high-availability tuning for specific service-level agreements [SLAs]) can be operationally risky to migrate. Better to leave them be.
• Vendor certifications that require you to use VMware as the hypervisor. Moving these workloads anyway can invalidate vendor support if something goes wrong.
• Applications tightly linked to NSX microsegmentation or vSAN storage policies, vRealize Automation workflows, or custom vSphere application programming interface (API) integrations can be prohibitively expensive to rearchitect and shift: the juice is likely not worth the squeeze.
• And finally, if you have workloads under regulatory or certification audit (PCI, HIPAA, SOX, and so on), you’d be well advised to leave them in place. Migrating in the middle of an audit cycle invites (even guarantees) additional scrutiny that can prolong your audit. Leave those workloads for now; reevaluate migration when the audit’s complete.

Third move: embrace hybrid life

There are different reasons to establish a future vision that includes workloads running in VMware ESXi and HVM hypervisors simultaneously.

In some cases, your objective might be cost optimization: achieving savings by shifting appropriate workloads to the lower-cost HVM hypervisor, while retaining VMware for workloads that either can’t move, or for which the costs of migration exceed the savings you’d achieve through a hypervisor shift.

For others, the argument for hybrid is performance-based: VMware is retained for workloads that work best on VMware, HVM is home to those that perform best on a kernel-based hypervisor, and you preserve mobility as conditions and business needs change over time.

In either case, HPE Morpheus Software makes these intentionally hybrid virtual approaches simple to establish and operate, with unified visibility, governance, automation, and operations across the multiple-hypervisor environment.

Fourth move: get professional help

This post is a high-level discussion of different ways you can approach VMware rationalization, and some of the considerations likely to inform your strategy. There’s quite a bit more to the process, not least the need for careful planning and analysis before you commit.

The Advisory and Professional Services team from HPE can provide end-to-end guidance for your migration program, including detailed workload analysis, architecture planning, and implementation oversight. And in addition to their support for the native bulk migration tools within HPE Morpheus Software and Advisory and Professional Services can incorporate HPE rapid migration tool, HPE Zerto Software, and RiveMeadow as appropriate to your workloads.

For a partner-led migration process, Partner Connect from HPE can help you identify and engage support through the HPE partner ecosystem, matching your needs with partner competencies and specializations.

Learn more at

HPE.com/us/en/private-cloud-solutions.html

Meet the author:
Maruyama Shohei, Global Lead of Cloud & Platform Services in Advisory & Professional Services
Linkedin.com/in/maruyama-shohei/