From VMware to Victory: How AWS Native Beats Uncertainty in the Broadcom Era
Sep 25, 2024
By Jeff Carson
The enterprise IT landscape is transforming and experiencing the most turbulence ever since Broadcom took over VMware, one of the largest and most common virtualization platforms. Through this development, questions of product continuity, support, or future innovation will loom around those organizations whose data centers and virtual environments are largely dependent on VMware technologies.
In this post, we’ll demonstrate that migration from VMware to AWS Native will not only solve these uncertainties but also put an organization in a more scalable, agile, and cost-effective stance for the cloud era. We’ll also talk through the challenges of the Broadcom acquisition and the upsides of an AWS-native strategy.
The Uncertainty of Change from Broadcom to VMware
The purchase of VMware by Broadcom has shaken the IT industry. It has been the backbone of enterprise IT for years, and it offers a very stable platform in virtualization and private cloud infrastructure. The line of concern has mostly come with Broadcom’s previous acquisition history, which usually focused on enhancing profitability at the expense of innovation.
A few major challenges stem from this acquisition:
- Ambiguous Product Roadmap: It is probable that Broadcom’s primary motivation for focusing so hard on profit margins might dull down the innovation cycle of VMware. This raises an eyebrow as to whether VMware will further iterate the product offering to cater to a modern enterprise’s needs, especially in hybrid cloud, containerization, and edge computing.
- Support and Service Concerns: Historically, Broadcom has had the least objectionable impacts on streamlining operations post-acquisition, even though that sometimes came with being stingy about spending money on customer support and R&D investments. For organizations dependent on VMware, this could manifest in longer support response times, less robust service offerings, and fewer updates to critical products.
- Pricing and Licensing Changes: As Broadcom makes acquisitions, the pricing models often change to existing products in a way that may not be advantageous to customers, or they might become subject to new terms with more stringent licensing terms and conditions. Companies using VMware products will see higher costs or more restrictions in terms of licenses, which complicates IT budgeting and long-term planning for IT environments.
- Strategic Uncertainty: With those factors playing in, IT leadership is really between a rock and a hard place with some difficult decisions to make: stick with VMware and hope it gets better, or pursue alternative products that are more stable and offer a clear path forward. These risks are significant to enterprises that have developed their IT strategies around VMware. Disruption is possible, and thus a contingency plan becomes all the more necessary.
A Roadmap to Migrating from VMware to AWS Native
Let us try to understand a case study of a mid-size enterprise that historically used VMware for all its virtualized workloads. This organization is concerned with the impact of Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware and decides to explore AWS as an alternative.
Assessment and Planning
The existing VMware environment needs to be analyzed before the migration process. The organization uses the AWS Migration Portfolio Assessment (MPA) to assess its current infrastructure. This provides insight into the workloads best suited for migration to AWS, including identifying potential challenges that might arise through this migration process.
Major considerations at this stage include:
- Workload Analysis: Identify which workloads are business-critical and what can be migrated first to de-risk the business.
- Cost Analysis: Projecting the costs associated with running workloads in AWS against the current costs of on-premises upkeep for the VMware environment.
- Skills evaluation: To find out the competence level of the IT team to handle an AWS environment, or if more training will be required.
Proof of Concept
To mitigate the risk, an enterprise begins the process with a proof of concept by selecting an application that is not mission-critical to the business. They use the AWS Application Migration Service (AWS MGN) or a third-party Independent Software Vendor for the replication of the application with its data into Amazon EC2 instances.
The organization during this PoC phase:
- Tests application performance: Ensures that the application behaves while running on AWS and does not fall in performance against on-premise VMware.
- Validates Security Posture: This ensures that the security control procedures being enacted in AWS are at least as good as or better than those from the original VMware environment.
- Monitors Costs: Implements AWS Cost Explorer to keep an eye on the actual running cost of the PoC within AWS, ensuring that migration does not go over budget.
Migration Execution
Full VMware workload migration to AWS, following the successful PoC: This is done step by step; first, one is to migrate the less critical workloads and then the most critical ones.
Key steps during the execution of migration are as follows:
- Data Replication: Be able to replicate large data sets to AWS without much downtime using AWS DataSync and AWS Snowball.
- Application Modernization: For the cases where applications have to be modernized, the organization uses AWS Lambda and Amazon EKS to re-architect such apps into serverless and containerized solutions.
- Security and Compliance: Continuously monitor security with AWS Security Hub, making sure all services are compliant with industry regulations and standards through AWS Config.
Optimization and Post-Migration
After migrating, the organization will focus on its AWS environment optimization to ensure efficiency and maximum cost-effectiveness. Considerations at this step will include:
- Optimizing resources: Use the AWS Trusted Advisor, CUDOS, and other tools to determine any underutilized resources and right-size to cut costs.
- Cost Management: Establish AWS Budgets to keep an eye on costs and get alerted in case of unexpected growth.
- Performance Monitoring: Utilize Amazon CloudWatch to monitor the performance of applications and infrastructure in accordance with the SLAs of an organization.
Why AWS Native Services Offer a Path Forward
As organizations debate the future of VMware, AWS Native services are offered as an alternative. AWS provides a rich ecosystem of cloud services that support modern IT requirements, ranging from infrastructure and storage to machine learning and analytics.
Here is why AWS Native services are a great option for an organization that’s considering a VMware to AWS migration:
- Comprehensive Cloud Infrastructure: AWS provides a colossal array of services from compute services like Amazon EC2, storage solutions like Amazon S3, and networking services such as Amazon VPC, all necessary to build and scale applications in the cloud.
- Flexibility and Agility: Contrary to traditional on-premise configurations, AWS permits organizations to react swiftly to business necessities in their ever-changing environment. It doesn’t matter if there is a need to scale resources up in peak demand or if one wants to be experimental with new technologies. Through AWS, you have full liberty in innovation without being pulled back because of legacy infrastructure.
- Global Reach: With many of its data centers located around the world, AWS supports organizations in implementing applications close to the user point for low-latency improvement. This means that data could be replicated across multiple regions, thus ensuring availability in practically every disaster recovery and business continuity event.
- Security and Compliance: AWS was built with security as its highest priority. It has a robust set of tools and services that enable enterprises to achieve their objectives about security and compliance. Also, the AWS shared responsibility model ensures that organizations know the extent of AWS’s involvement in securing their environment.
- Cost-effective: The pricing model of AWS is pay-as-you-go, whereby organizations only pay for what they consume. Coupled with management tools for cost, like the AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Budgets, this is the way an organization can save on spending for the most advantageous total cost of ownership.
- Optimization and Post-Migration: After the migration process is complete, further optimization must be done in the AWS environment to work with maximum efficiency cost-effectively. This encompasses the following:
- Resource Optimization: Leverage AWS Trusted Advisor to identify resources and right-size them for cost optimization.
- Cost Management: Set up AWS Budgets to be aware of the spent amount and catch any overruns in the budget.
- Performance Monitoring: Use Amazon CloudWatch to monitor the performance of applications and infrastructure to meet organizational SLAs.
Considerations and Challenges of VMware to AWS Migration
Despite the compelling benefits of the move to AWS Native services, the associated difficulties cannot be disregarded:
- Skill Gaps: Different skills are needed for the transition to AWS than those required to administer the VMware environment. The organization may have to invest in developing skills or hiring new talent to handle the AWS environment effectively.
- Application Re-Architecture: Some legacy applications may need re-architecting themselves to fully exploit the services that AWS offers. The process is complex and time-consuming, needing a lot of attention and pre-planning in the execution phase.
- Change Management: The shift to AWS is a tectonic change for any organization; proper change management is required for success.
Benefits of Moving to AWS Native
Migrating from VMware to AWS Native services hosts manifold benefits, most of which directly address the uncertainties introduced by Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware.
- Scalability: The elasticity of the AWS infrastructure allows organizations to scale up and down on demand without compromising productivity, and therefore just pay for the resources they require at that time. It proves cost-effective for organizations with peak times and erratic workloads, as over-provisioning is unlikely to be the need of the hour.
- Innovation: With over 200 services in its kit bag, AWS helps innovate, be it with AI/ML, the Internet of Things, or data analytics, to edge past competition. Organizations can adopt these state-of-the-art technologies by moving to AWS without risking expensive hardware investments or needing to master specialized expertise.
- Reliability: AWS has a global network of data centers, so it is highly available and redundant. This ensures that applications can be accessed even with a regional outage. AWS’s robust infrastructure is backed by the most solid SLAs in the industry, giving organizations peace of mind that their applications will stay online and performant.
- Cost Efficiency: With AWS pay-as-you-go, coupled with available cost optimization tools, the realization of cost efficiency generally saves much more for the organization than holding on to on-premises VMware environments. With AWS, you can cut down your capital expenditure and shift it toward a much more predictable operating expense model.
- Security and Compliance: At this time, AWS security and compliance frameworks are considered among the best developed. By using the AWS Key Management Service and AWS Identity and Access Management features, organizational data can be secured, maintaining it in a secure and compliant manner with industry requirements.
Conclusion – VMware to AWS Migration
For most organizations, migrating from VMware to AWS Native is a strategic opportunity to answer the concerns raised by the acquisition of VMware by Broadcom. That’s not really about risk mitigation; it’s all about embracing the future when scalability, agility, and innovation will rise above all.
The elasticity, pricing model, state-of-the-art services, and the corresponding documentation of AWS’s global infrastructure are great tools that help enterprises eliminate the obstacles of traditional virtualization; hence, those organizations achieve greater operational efficiency, cost reduction, and acceleration in the path toward digital transformation.
But, of course, all this must be carefully planned and executed. The assessment of an existing VMware environment and re-architecting applications for the cloud require much thought at each step. It expects that organizations should invest in upskilling their IT teams and managing change effectively to walk through the transitions.
The benefits of a VMware to AWS migration are many compared to the challenges. Deploying AWS allows organizations to future-proof their IT operations in readiness for success in a world of digital change. Those who elect to go with AWS will not only avoid potential potholes but also create new chances for growth and innovation.
Therefore, this proactive step will help enterprises come out of uncertainty into a win-win situation by unleashing the full power of AWS native services to steer their business ahead.
Ready to get started on your VMware to AWS migration journey? Contact us today for a consultation.
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