Sorry to be the bearer of bad news but it’s time to start learning about VMware vSphere Alternatives such as: OpenStack, SmartCloud, CloudStack?
vSphere Alternatives
Since the 90s I’ve been on the VMware bandwagon and have honed my VMware product skills and experience through 6 generations of Hypervisors including GSX, if you want to consider GSX a Hypervisor – that is?
I admit I’ve dabbled here and there with Hyper-V, XenServer, and VirtualBox, but nothing serious because VMware has always been on the cutting edge of virtualization (virtualization) and cloud technology.
Even my blog is 99.9% about VMware products, tips, and best practices…but there are vSphere alternatives we need to start considering if we want to keep our jobs.
Read the Writing on the Wall
In keeping up with the news this weekend, I found this article by Jack McCarthy alarming: VMware Shows Strength As Private Cloud Platform Provider.
On the surface Jack’s data puts VMware in a commanding lead over the competition, however, from a technology perspective if all you know is VMware vSphere and ESXi, then you’re only skilled on 34% of what businesses are using for their virtual infrastructures and private clouds.
I suggest you take a closer look at the chart above from Jack’s article.
Do you see what I see?
Potentially, 66% of the virtualization market is not using VMware products.
Do you have the skills to make the transition from ESXi to KVM, or from vCloud Director to OpenStack?
Is it time that we start looking outside the box and become experts with VirtualBox and Eucalyptus?
Not to mention all the alternatives to VMware View that have sprung up, and Citrix is not playing games with XenDesktop or XenClient… Read more about other virtual machine software. And newcomer, Nutanix.
It Could Get Ugly
VMware is not going out of business any time soon but it’s going to get ugly for the die-hard VCP and VCDX who love VMware more than network engineers love Cisco.
My recommendation is to keep your options opened and always keep learning new technologies.
Never put all your virtual eggs in one basket (pardon the pun).
VMware is doing some great stuff, but I’ve seen over the last few years a turn for the worst where they have killed off perfectly good products, or make costly licensing changes, in order to force their customers into more expensive options: VRAM, Update Manager, and Lab Manager are a few examples that come to mind.
Conclusion:
Let’s see how the year pans out and if there are any more big announcements from the big players – Oracle, Cisco, and Citrix are hungry!
And there’s always Amazon AWS who so far has stayed in the public cloud, but if VMware starts buying cloud providers… it could get ugly for vSphere alternatives!
Update:
Well, the new year has begun with VMware cleaning house on their top LEADERSHIP, and the new leadership setting new expectations on the PUBLIC cloud. Read more about the new VMware.
Update:
VMware is now owned by Dell, imagine that! $67 billion Dell-EMC deal closes today
Hi Joe very interesting article I wasn’t aware that Dell acquired VMWare perhaps this explains their aggresssive 6.7 hardware deprecation :). I thought it was a relationship with vendors but didn’t realize VMWare and Dell are one!
Good observation on the VMWare marketshare it looks like a lot of enterprise is moving to KVM based OpenSource solutions such as oVirt and especially OpenStack. It will be interesting to see where things head. I think with such hardware deprecation that a lot of organizations are virtually being forced to KVM based solutions. For any hardware the lifespan is virtually limitless on KVM based solutions.