In the wake of Broadcom’s 2023 acquisition of VMware, the enterprise IT world found itself at a crossroads. Rapid, unexpected changes to VMware’s licensing model sent shockwaves through thousands of organizations, forcing a stark choice: stay and absorb dramatic cost increases—or seek out an alternative platform capable of handling mission-critical workloads.
Enter OpenStack
For many organizations, OpenStack was that cloud they looked into 10 years ago and decided that it wasn’t the right platform for them at the time. Since then, thanks to thousands of contributors and hundreds of organizations, OpenStack has matured significantly into a stable platform trusted to handle any workload. It has simplified and addressed feedback from users. It has been adopted and evolved by thousands of developers at hundreds of organizations all around the globe. OpenStack has evolved to support complex, large-scale infrastructure with power and flexibility.
With a second look, organizations around the world are discovering just how much the OpenStack marketplace has grown in the last decade. There have been 21 releases since 2015 and with each one there have been numerous upgrades and advancements. These organizations have a lot of questions though; namely, how does a migration from VMware to OpenStack work?
Available Today: A Comprehensive VMware-to-OpenStack Migration Guide
Last year, the OpenInfra Member community collaborated to create the VMware Migration Whitepaper to start a public dialogue positioning OpenStack as an option in this quest for a virtualization alternative. It helped educate this market on the why of the situation – why OpenStack could be a strategic, cost saving alternative. As a result, questions are now focused on the how.
Today, I am proud to introduce the VMware Migration Guide, which answers these questions. The idea behind the guide is to build on the foundation that last year’s white paper began. The Guide’s aim is to prime the organizations for making the move to OpenStack by helping with the planning stages, the candid assessment of the existing stack, and setting up a mindset for modernizing infrastructure and the operating model.
The Guide was created by a group of OpenInfra community members with experience and knowledge in this space and includes:
- Case Studies of real world workload migration
- Reference architectures to show how an OpenStack cloud offering might be laid out and how that can serve the workload that is currently on VMware
- Considerations, comparisons and the clear benefits of moving to OpenStack to avoid vendor lock-in and capitalize on all that comes with leveraging an open source solution
How OpenStack Introduces Benefits of Open Source to a Previously Locked In Crowd
As organizations consider the move from a proprietary solution like VMware to an open source based product, the benefits are not limited to a reduction in licensing costs. The most impactful benefit is actually the dissolution of vendor lock-in; you are no longer bound to the decisions or product roadmap of a single vendor. The OpenStack Marketplace proves there is an entire ecosystem for you to explore and interoperability you can leverage until you find the right partner.
Beyond the Marketplace, OpenStack is backed by a global community openly developing code that is better tested and more robust. Now is the time for your organization to take another look at OpenStack. Learn more about the benefits and challenges of VMware to OpenStack Migration and join this global movement.