Leaving VMware forces a fresh look at every layer of the datacenter, and data protection belongs near the top of that list. Most teams plan to move the backup design across as it stands and rebuild it on the new hypervisor. The better plan uses the exit to raise resiliency and recovery speed, keeps the backup application, and gives each layer the work it does best. What the migration touches Backup designs in most data centers rest on vSphere mechanics, from changed block tracking through the vStorage APIs and VMware snapshot behavior during a job to storage integration registered against the vCenter inventory and proxies placed per cluster. Many shops add an orchestration product such as Site Recovery Manager to drive the failover plan. Change the hypervisor and each of those assumptions gets a second look. Backup vendors have done real work here, and support for the major KVM-based platforms has matured quickly over the past year. The bigger question sits upstream of the backup application. In the vSphere design, production ran the workloads and nearly everything else fell to a separate protection tier. Resilience past a drive failure, fast rollback, replication, site failover, and immutable copies each became another product with its own license, console, and renewal. Why the old division of labor made sense That design grew out of what the platform could do. Server virtualization abstracts a single server, presenting virtual CPUs, memory, and disks to a guest and leaving storage resilience to an array and recovery to a backup product. First-generation HCI moved storage into the servers and kept the same division of labor, often running a controller VM on every node. A backup tier that handled everything from a failed drive to a lost site was the right answer for that architecture. The cost of that arrangement shows up on the worst day. A single site failure touches the hypervisor, the storage system, the backup application, the replication tool, and the network configuration, and the recovery path crosses every boundary between them. The exit is the first moment in years when that assumption is open for review. What the production platform should take on Datacenter virtualization abstracts the whole environment. Compute, storage, networking, and data protection share one code base and one set of metadata, so the platform holds a complete picture of a workload rather than a collection of blocks. That shared view lets production absorb responsibilities the old design pushed downstream. Far fewer events reach the backup tier once production handles them. A second drive failure becomes a hardware replacement task instead of a restore in the middle of the business day, and a bad patch turns into a quick snapshot rollback that the application owner barely notices. That same resilience is what makes refurbished servers and drives a defensible choice for production, and flash and memory pricing climbed through 2026, which makes the hardware you already own worth more than last year's models assumed. Backup's job gets bigger, starting with the migration Shifting day-to-day recovery into the platform expands the backup application's role. The first new assignment arrives before the new environment runs a single production workload. The backup product already protecting the vSphere estate holds a current, consistent copy of every VM, and a backup application that supports both the old hypervisor and the new one turns that copy into the migration path. Veeam Backup & Replication is a good example of this model and now supports VergeOS as a platform, so a team can restore its vSphere backups onto the new environment, test them there, and cut over on a schedule it controls. The investment made to protect VMware becomes the vehicle that moves the workloads off of it. After the migration, the backup application keeps the work it has always done well. Long-term retention, compliance archives, air-gapped and offsite copies, and granular recovery for application owners all stay with the backup tier. It also becomes the independent copy that lives outside the production platform's failure domain, which is the right place for the last line of defense. Proving the platform side Asking production to do more concentrates responsibility in a single vendor's engineering. That trade is defensible, and it is only defensible against evidence. Ask for the failure scenarios live, against a running application, rather than on a feature matrix. Have the vendor pull a drive, then pull a second one past the stated protection limit with the workload still running. Ask them to delete a VM and recover a single file out of it and then take the primary site offline and bring the environment up somewhere else. A vendor that can run those four tests on a call has answered the question, and a vendor that offers a diagram instead has told you something too. Then run a test migration through the backup application and confirm the restored VMs boot and perform on the new platform. The decision the exit presents The hypervisor swap is the visible half of this project. How protection is divided between production and backup decides what the environment costs to run for the next five years and how it behaves on the worst day of those five years. Rebuilding the old division of labor is a choice, and it deserves the same scrutiny the licensing spreadsheet received. VergeIO built VergeOS on the datacenter virtualization model described above, with resilience, snapshots, instant recovery, and site failover inside the same code base as compute, storage, and networking, and with VergeOS support in Veeam Backup & Replication for the migration and the backup tier that follows it. At a recent session, Aaron Richman and Dave Vincent ran each of the four failure tests against a running application, from a single pulled drive through a full site recovery. The session is available on demand. Take a look, and see how you can turn a big exit into a bigger opportunity. George Crump is Chief Marketing Officer at VergeIO. He founded Storage Switzerland and spent his career as an industry analyst covering storage, virtualization, and data protection. Supplied by VergeIO
VMware has defended its decision to end public downloads of its Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK). VDDK is an SDK that a Broadcom technical document describes as “a set of libraries and utilities that enable software developers to create applications that can access and manipulate virtual disks used” and also “provides APIs for backup and recovery, cloning, and other operations on virtual disks.” Those qualiies mean VDDK is also useful when moving VMs from VMware to another virtualization environment. VMware’s rivals spotted that and made VDDK part of their migration tools. Nutanix’s Move, for example, requires a VDDK library to do the job. Red Hat also recommends using VDDK for migrations. ShapeBlue, an integrator that specializes in Apache CloudStack, an alternative to VMware, rates VDDK as an important part of migration tools. “The virt-v2v engine that sits underneath most VMware-to-KVM conversion work supports VDDK as an input transport,” the company wrote in late August. ShapeBlue’s post appeared a day or two after VMware, without fanfare or an explanation, took down the web pages that offered VDDK downloads. “A vendor is entitled to change how it distributes an SDK,” ShapeBlue wrote. “Doing it without a word, while the Apache CloudStack administration guide and other projects’ install instructions still tell people to click a link that no longer resolves, is something else.” “The cost lands unevenly too,” the company added. “A large backup vendor with a partner relationship has someone to call. A three-person migration consultancy, an open-source project, or a customer converting their own workloads has a forum post and a 404.” In an email to The Register, VMware defended its actions. To understand its response, know that VMware calls third party developers who work with its products technology alliance partners – aka “TAPs”. “Access to the VDDK is still available through select TAP for its licensed use case, which has always been backup and recovery,” VMware told The Register. “Customers needing backup and recovery capabilities can choose from the many approved solutions already available from these partners.” “The VDDK is not a customer entitlement. It is a software development kit covered by its own developer license and was never included with a Broadcom software purchase,” a company spokesperson added. VMware’s argument is therefore that users should not expect they can use VDDK, and that migrations is an unlicensed use case for the tool – which remains available as part of products from TAP members. VMware’s rivals have pointed out that ending public VDDK downloads could disrupt some migration projects that have already commenced, making the withdrawal of downloads jarring given the virtualization giant hasn’t previously policed use of the SDK. Services organizations that perform VMware migrations have found workarounds that make it possible to migrate VMs without needing VDDK. VMware’s decision to stop public VDDK downloads comes at a time when its changed licensing policies have seen some users either consider reducing their use of its products – as was the case at VMware channel partner Rackspace – or shifting to a rival platform. VDDK has been downloadable for years and VMware cannot have been ignorant of how its rivals used the SDK to facilitate migrations. It’s therefore not hard to conclude that this is a defensive move by VMware, given it allowed downloads for years. Moving VMs is, however, among the easier parts of a virtualization migration project. Rebuilding or replacing the entirety of a virtualized environment, across networks, security, and storage, is the hard part and VMware knows it - which is why it offers a site recovery tool that doubles as a migration utility. Removing easy access to VDDK therefore doesn’t change much for those planning a move away from VMware. ®
For many small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMBs), VMware has become too expensive.
Broadcom’s acquisition of the virtualization firm brought the end of perpetual license sales and the arrival of pricey, stacked, subscription-based bundles that priced out many SMBs.
The most obvious is VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), VMware’s flagship private cloud bundle that has been Broadcom’s primary focus since taking over VMware. Many SMBs find that VCF is unaffordable and stuffed with unnecessary offerings. However, numerous customers have reported online that VMware sales representatives have still pushed them toward VCF, with some claiming that sales reps have told them that the lower-priced edition of VMware’s virtualization platform, vSphere Standard, was no longer available.
Tottenham Hotspur, a professional soccer team that’s part of the Premier League, has saved over 85 percent in licensing fees by replacing its stadium's VMware instance with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise’s (HPE’s) Morpheus VM Essentials (VME) virtualization software.
Tottenham hasn’t disclosed which VMware products it used or how much it previously paid the Broadcom firm.
The soccer organization confirmed this week to The Register that it has moved its stadium's server, storage, and networking infrastructure to HPE solutions delivered through HPE's hybrid cloud management platform, GreenLake. That is all “underpinned by" VME and HPE's OpsRamp software for hybrid and multi-cloud environments, Rob Pickering, Tottenham's CTO, told the publication, with HPE in charge of the hybrid cloud-managed service.
Omarchy is a new curated Linux distribution that offers a pre-configured keyboard driven environment and window manager. It’s lightweight and highly customizable, with system integrated AI tools, making for a unique take on operating systems. With Omarchy gaining quite a bit of attention, you might be curious in giving Omarchy a test run, but perhaps ... Read More
Upgrades the virtualization software with support for macOS 27 Golden Gate and adds OpenGL 4.3 graphics driver support. ($99.99 Standard Edition subscription, free update, 5.4 MB, macOS 14+)
Nutanix is closer to porting its stack to the Arm architecture, spurred by the high price of hardware and a desire to ensure customers can run its wares wherever they want to. CEO Rajiv Ramaswami today told The Register Nutanix customers are currently acutely aware of hardware costs and availability, issues that are slowing some purchases of its software. Nutanix is trying to avoid such delays by expanding its hardware compatibility list and supporting external storage devices – moves Ramaswami said mean users can migrate away from VMware without needing to replace hardware. He said Nutanix also continues to optimize the footprint of its stack and pointed to its decision to allow bare metal installations of its Kubernetes Platform as another hardware-minimization effort. The CEO today told The Register Nutanix now sees Arm support as another way to ensure its software platform can run wherever users need it, and believes that adopting the architecture will mean it can run on lower-cost hardware that users won’t balk at buying in the current climate. That’s an advance on Nutanix’s 2024 position on an Arm port as a worthy future consideration, but not an item on its development to-do list. AI support is, understandably, higher on that list and yesterday Nutanix delivered an update to its Enterprise AI suite that added a Model Context Protocol (MCP) gateway – a tool that sits between agents and MCP servers to provide identity management and security services to control the data and other services agents can access. MCP Gateways are quickly becoming standard issue in packaged AI infrastructure stacks, so Nutanix has made sure it’s on par with competitors. Another cost Ramaswami thinks his customers want to control is spending on tokens used in and produced by AI apps, and the company has dogfooded in this field by spending $20 million on its own AI infrastructure – a sum that he expects to recoup in a year “Our software teams have been using AI for coding across the lifecycle,” he told The Register, and initially used tools including Copilot and Claude. “Usage exploded and so did costs,” the CEO admitted. The company has therefore moved to using open weight models and an on-prem cluster. “We are no longer paying on a per-token basis,” Ramaswami said. Some users occasionally use frontier models or external clusters, when necessary, an arrangement the CEO suggested is increasingly common as organizations match models and infrastructure providers to workloads rather than using LLMs for all AI apps. Ramaswami made his remarks about Arm and Nutanix’s on-prem cluster during a media briefing about the company’s Q4 results, which saw it win $757 million revenue, a 16 percent year-over-year jump. Full year revenue grew 12 percent to $2.85 billion. Net income landed at $1.5 billion for the full year. “Our fiscal 2026 results demonstrated a good balance of top and bottom line performance with,” said CFO Rukmini Sivaraman. “We remain focused on delivering sustainable growth and improving profitability.” Ramaswami pointed to the fact that Nutanix won 3,000 new customers in the financial year as evidence of growth and said many chose the company’s platform as an alternative to VMware. Nutanix will continue to win customers from VMware for another five years, he predicted. ®
If you’re curious about testing out MacOS 27 Golden Gate beta but you aren’t ready for the full commitment of installing it as your primary operating system, the simplest and safest way to run MacOS 27 Golden Gate beta is within a virtual machine. While one of our authors dove right into MacOS 27 Golden ... Read More
ASIF takes a lot of inspiration from existing virtual disk formats. Practically, that means it’s another sparse virtual disk format, and functions very similar to sparse VMDK, VHDX or QCOW2 files (for the uninitiated, it allow you to store a large disk, or file, in a smaller, “sparse” manner).
Shortly before the release of macOS Tahoe (late 2025), I thought it’d be a fun exercise to try and write a parser for ASIF files.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Hewlett Packard Enterprise's (HPE) new virtualization software promotion will likely pique the interest of end users and resellers who are unhappy with Broadcom's pricing of VMware. During its HPE Discover event in Las Vegas this week, HPE announced that customers could use its "HPE Morpheus Software -- VM Essentials" offering for free for "up to one year," per a press release. HPE's website describes its virtualization platform as a "VMware alternative." It includes a hardware virtual machine (HVM) hypervisor and unified management and lets users "manage VMware ESXi and HVM clusters from one console and migrate when you're ready," HPE's website says. "New VM Essentials customers can receive up to one free year of licenses for VM Essentials, a year of HPE Zerto for $1 to support non-disruptive migration to HPE virtual machines, and 0 percent interest on software through HPE Financial Services," HPE's announcement reads, referring to HPE's group for helping IT teams manage funding.
Free for a year is cheaper than what Broadcom has charged for VMware vSphere since taking over. VMware prices have skyrocketed due to VMware's parent company eliminating perpetual licenses and bundling products into expensive packages. Notably, per its website, HPE recommends charging $600 per CPU socket per year for VM Essentials; Broadcom has controversially shifted vSphere licensing pricing to a per-core basis. "Customers are feeling quite a bit of pain in the change that some of the virtualization companies have put there, specifically Broadcom," Jeremiah Jenson, VP of HPE's North American channel and partner ecosystem, told CRN. The executive claimed that VM Essentials could bring up to 90 percent cost savings compared to VMware while also helping to "eliminate vendor lock-in and simplify hybrid IT."
From March 1 to June 30, HPE has also been offering a free year of VM Essentials via rebate to customers who buy an AMD server and a one-year VM Essentials license. VM Essentials is only available through channel partners, a stark contrast from Broadcom's VMware approach, where the chip giant has drastically reduced the number of resellers that can sell VMware products. HPE's new promotion aims to entice customers to more deeply consider migrating off VMware. [...] HPE also announced that it would give 600 reseller partners who earn the HPE partner program's Private Cloud with Virtualization competency by the end of the year free VM Essentials software licenses for three years. Partners still have to pay support costs, though. The benefit is "a step in the correct direction," said Dean Colpitts, CTO of Canadian managed services provider (MSP) Members IT Group (MITG), which VMware cut from its reseller program after 19 years of partnership a year ago. However, limiting the promotion to 600 partners is "very shortsighted." He believes that HPE should give all of its partners VM Essentials "to facilitate getting [VM Essentials] into customer sites and displacing the competitors."
"They need to fling [VM Essentials] as far and as fast as they possibly [can] to immediately gain traction and draw ISVs to them, which will increase adoption even more," he said.
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