The list of VMware rivals trying to poach workloads is swelling and recent days highlight how vendors are stepping up the pressure.
HPE CEO Antonio Neri said that customers are interested in its HPE VM Essentials product line as they look to manage virtualization across HPE, VMware and other players.
"Customers are also asking us to help them simplify their VMware private clouds and optimize their virtualization costs. At HPE Discover Barcelona 2 weeks ago, we launched HPE VM Essentials, which enables customers to manage their virtualization states across HPE VMware and many others," said Neri, speaking on the company’s fourth quarter earnings call.
Neri's comments landed a few days after Amazon Web Services' re:Invent 2024 conference kicked off. AWS launched Q Developer features that enable an enterprise to automate much of their VMWare migration.
With Amazon Q Developer, a customer can move away from VMware with more ease. Amazon Q Developer can automate and complete tasks including analysis, planning, code generation and testing. Amazon used Q Developer to convert old versions of Java to Java 17 and saved 4,500 years of development work.
The bet is that AWS can give customers the Q Developer tools to transform legacy infrastructure and migrate workloads to the cloud. Executives said customers who were dependent on VMware vSphere are looking at other options since Broadcom has changed its pricing strategy.
In addition, Red Hat this week also posted a walkthrough on migrating VMware vSphere customers Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization.
As previously reported, Nutanix has been among the biggest beneficiaries of the VMware turmoil. Nutanix recently reported a strong first quarter and fielded multiple questions about VMware.
- Nutanix lands larger deals in Q4, ups outlook, plays long game vs. VMware
- Broadcom CEO Hock Tan aims to woo VMware customers with private cloud, simplification pitch
- Nutanix product additions, partnerships designed to capitalize on VMware customer angst
- Nutanix winning deals vs. VMware, but Broadcom punching back with pricing
Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami said the company has ramped up a partnership with AWS to move workloads from VMware to its NC2 platform on AWS. He said:
"As part of this collaboration, customers will gain access to promotional credits from AWS to support customer migrations and proof of concept trials as well as Nutanix licensing promotions. Customers can also gain access to promotional credits for migrating VMware Cloud on AWS workloads to NC2 on AWS through the AWS VMware Migration Accelerator program."
Ramaswami added that the VMware installed base continues to look at options. He added that typically VMware migrations also revolve around hardware upgrade including Nutanix converged systems with Dell.
"It's a dynamic market in the sense that sometimes we'll see aggressive behavior from Broadcom as well to keep those customers, especially the very large ones," said Ramaswami.
Although VMware migrations were a big story in 2024, Ramaswami noted that the trend will go for years. He said enterprises that are tethered to vSphere and willing to replace hardware can swap quickly--perhaps within a month or two.
Public cloud migrations off of VMware are also relatively simple. "A lot of that is automated as well," said Ramaswami. "VMware Cloud on AWS is also easy to migrate onto a Nutanix offering."
The big accounts--like the enterprises VMware is trying to keep--have more complicated migrations.
Ramaswamy said:
"These large customers that use multiple VMware products with massive estates. And there it can be many years, it can be three years to do a migration just because they can't migrate all of it at once, there is a requirement for professional services engagement to convert over some of their more complex custom scripts that they have written and custom investments they've made on top of the VMware portfolio. So those migrations tend to be more complex, require professional services and take a few years.
Nutanix is also leveraging its channel partners to take VMware workloads. Given VMware has tried to go direct with its largest accounts, channel partners are coming to Nutanix. "We are not trying to work around them or shut them out of any of the deals. We've seen a significant increase in channel partner engagement with us over the last year or two," said Ramaswamy.
