How to Migrate Off VMware and Keep Your Hardware | Cristian Klein, Mirantis | TFiR

Swapnil Bhartiya: As we all know that a lot of things change in the VMware world after the whole Broadcom acquisition, license pricing, and now it’s a cycle. Renewal is coming up and when VMware renewal rates hit hard, teams face a tough choice because staying means paying more while leaving raises the question of what happens to the hardware they already own, what happens to moving their workload. That’s why some operators are looking at a private cloud alternative that keeps the hardware they already have, and comes with migration and ongoing managed services to get there. And today we have with us Cristian Klein, Product Manager at Mirantis, who’s here to talk about how teams can move off VMware. First of all, Cristian, it’s great to have you on the show.

Cristian Klein: Thank you. Thank you for having me here.

Swapnil Bhartiya: I mean, of course, we have been covering this story forever since the whole acquisition happened. Of course, I talked to VMware back then also, and they’re like, nothing to worry about. But That’s the story that you hear. But we are here now. Talk a bit about what kind of challenges, pain points you are seeing the customers who were on VMware and now they’re looking to move away, what challenges they face. Then we’ll talk about, you know, how Mirantis can help them. But let’s talk about the state of, you know, VMware world right now.

Cristian Klein: So let me briefly talk to the state of VMware. So as you might already know, 3 years ago approximately, Broadcom acquired VMware. And customers suddenly faced with a quite huge increase in licensing costs. Now, as you know, many of those customers have managed to get a 3 to 5 year commitment, which means that they bought themselves quite a bit of time. But what’s happening now is that we’re seeing that wave of renewals coming in and customers are pretty much looking for solutions to get to take back control of their IT budgets and of their IT strategy.

Swapnil Bhartiya: When organizations come to Mirantis for help moving their VMware workloads, what are they actually primarily asking for? Where are they hitting the road that they’re looking for some help?

Cristian Klein: So honestly speaking, I feel very strongly for those customers who are coming to us. It’s like they invested a lot in VMware, their whole strategy, their whole automation, their whole staff is very highly specialized in VMware, and they simply don’t have the required expertise to move away from VMware to an open infrastructure solution such as Mirantis OpenStack. So these teams are extremely concerned. First of all, do they realise the total cost ownership reduction that they are looking for? Will they— how exactly will the migration go forward? How do you take your VMs from your old estate and move them onto Mirantis OpenStack? And then will you encounter the same capabilities, or where exactly will you miss some of the capabilities when moving from one platform to another? And these are all questions that now Mirantis is helping our customers answer thanks to our VMware minimization launch that we just announced.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Now, if you just stay at VMware for a bit, they also did a lot of, of course, consolidation of their products. They used to have a lot of open source projects were also there, and then also price changing. So what is hitting customers hard? What is actually making people consider migrating away from VMware?

Cristian Klein: Well, first of all, it’s really the unpredictability of their IT budgets. We have heard some of the customers being hit by— one of the customers that came to us, they were hit by 600% renewal increase. And if we’re talking about that number, you know, that’s money that is not being put to hardware, that’s money that’s not being put to staff, that’s money that is not going to growing your business. So It’s quite an amount. And essentially that customer of ours was coming crying saying like, well, with this renewal we cannot make ends meet. We’re going out of business. We cannot make a reasonable margin anymore if we accept this renewal.

Swapnil Bhartiya: For those customers, as you just mentioned, somebody facing a 600% increase in pricing, for whatever reason, the organizations that want to move VMware workload, what is Mirantis offering them? What are you folks actually providing them to make it easier for them with that migration?

Cristian Klein: So what we are doing is that essentially we are offering a customer an end-to-end solution from planning to production. So what we mean by this is that eligible customers receive a 2-day complimentary architecture workshop, which means we’re looking at their current estate, we’re looking at their goals and their decision drivers, and we’re together devising where their future estate wants to be. If they want to keep their existing hardware or the existing storage arrays, that’s of course very much something that we will plan and discuss during that particular meeting. Then we also install Mirantis OpenStack for free to all of the customers based on the discussions that we’re having. We’re migrating all of their virtual machines to the new installation again for free. And afterwards, the customers may choose 2 paths for operations. Either choose our offer called OpsCare, in which case the customer is operating Mirantis OpenStack and this is supported by Mirantis. So in that case, we don’t have access to the environment. We’re just helping out the customers. Or if they just want to have hands-off and don’t want to— they want to save time and not retrain in becoming OpenStack operators, then we provide OpsCare Plus, in which case we have a fully managed service on their own hardware with maintenance, with incident management, with proactive monitoring and everything that is expected from such a service.

Swapnil Bhartiya: And at their own end, you know, for their teams as they talk to Mirantis and they are exploring options for moving off VMware, how do they get started? What homework they have to do internally when they talk to Mirantis?

Cristian Klein: Well, they first of all need to make the team available for us. Usually such a 2-day architecture workshop really needs to gather their subject matter experts. This may span people who have expertise in their networking fabric, people who have expertise in their firewall, in their storage array, but also people who, you know, are present in the data center and know exactly how the hardware is installed and configured, as well as potentially people from the applications, right, the consumers of the private cloud who might better understand the intricacies and certain special choices which have been made in certain VMs. And by having all of this competence and intelligence and expertise in the room for 2 days, we can then very quickly draft a plan and a roadmap towards moving them away from VMware onto Mirantis in order to gain back control of their IT budgets.

Swapnil Bhartiya: When customers are comparing what they paid with VMware, or if they stay with VMware, what they will continue to pay versus what they pay with Mirantis, how does that comparison look like?

Cristian Klein: It can be quite a huge difference. We have been seeing customers, um, on the back-of-the-envelope calculation, this may mean a 5 to 6x reduction in your IT budget. And in fact, we’re very transparent about this. Our website now includes a public TCO calculator to allow you to very quickly get a feeling for the amount of money you may save. Depending on the number of nodes, the number of cores per node, and the amount of commitment. And this is a very interesting point because in contrast to VMware, who charges per core, we charge per node. So customers investing in high-density servers in order to get more compute capacity and storage capacity for their data center surface, they will actually see significant savings if moving to Mirantis.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Let’s talk about hardware and the name hardware because hardware is hard, you know, small firmware changes or small chip changes can break and make things— it is hard to manage. So many teams may not want to replace the hardware that they already own. So how does the Mirantis alternative preserve their investment in hardware?

Cristian Klein: Oh, that’s actually also something that we discussed thoroughly with the customers during the Complementary to the workshop, but in principle is usually these customers they have a little bit of spare capacity on their hardware. We set up the Mirantis control plane, and then we slowly move servers from VMware onto Mirantis, and at the same time also migrate VMs from the old configuration to the new configuration. So we help them preserve their existing hardware. while at the same time, you know, moving VMs from the old VMware installation to the new Mirantis installation one by one.

Swapnil Bhartiya: If you look at Mirantis Private Cloud, it is of course built on all open infrastructure. A lot of open source components are there. What does that mean for teams that have been totally, you know, buried in VMware ecosystem?

Cristian Klein: For us, the biggest advantage And you highlighted really well why VMware has been slowly locking in customers into a proprietary stack, into proprietary APIs. Mirantis is based on open infrastructure projects such as OpenStack, which means that when we’re moving customers, we’re not only migrating them from one proprietary platform to another, but rather we are moving them towards open standards and hopefully making this the last painful migration of their VMware estates. This is, like I said, both a leverage for them. So this means that they’re taking back IT strategy. But we see in this also an opportunity for the administrators that have been— that are looking to upskill their careers in order to learn more about open infrastructure projects and in order to learn more about how open standards are used. The other nice thing is also that some of these skills are also portable. So we have already heard about very many customers who are using, for example, Terraform, Ansible, OpenTofu in order to manage VMs on VMware. And guess what? Those skills are reusable and are portable across stacks. So some of our customers might actually find themselves pretty much at home and notice that there is quite a substantial capability parity when moving from one virtualization platform to another.

Swapnil Bhartiya: What kind of traffic you are seeing where people are desperate to move away from VMware? Where it’s like in general that you’re seeing, or you have seen a spike because of the renewals, because of license change, because of the price increase? What I want to understand is that how much movement are you seeing where people are looking at migrating away from the VMware ecosystem?

Cristian Klein: So we have seen quite some traffic in that direction. I’m not sure how many numbers I can share, but let’s just say that we landed We won a couple of deals since August. And then if you’re looking what’s happening in the other space, so we have been invited to RFIs and RFPs. But to be honest with you, when I was reading them, they really felt more like a VMware minimization strategy packaged as an RFI, as an RFP. And I have seen quite a few of them. So I would say that the interest is really high and we are barely seeing the front And

Swapnil Bhartiya: I mean, Mirantis, you know, recently you folks have been focusing, of course, going back to open source and then focusing a lot on, of course, NeoCloud, of course, the whole Iron acquisition, and then of course the focus on AI. What, how is that work? Plus your whole investment in, you know, of course, OpenStack and then Kubernetes, because how is that experience going to help with helping? Because most of the, even VMware customers, they’re all on the AI bandwagon either way. That’s the work that they’re doing. Yeah. they’re looking at. So the work that you have been doing for ages on Mirantis, how that actually helped you prepare to help those VMware customers?

Cristian Klein: Yeah, thank you for this question. Very good question. So you’re right that the immediate need that we’re addressing right now is taking back control of your IT budget and your IT strategy. And once that milestone has been achieved, what are we going to do with your IT budget? And many of our customers are already thinking about investing in GPUs or perhaps running some agents which are sandboxed and which are carefully contained. And if you’re thinking about it, VMware’s virtualization technology is excellent for defining very clear multi-tenant, clear administration boundaries between different business units, between different agents, which are then leveraging the AI strategy of our customers. So I fully agree with you, right? The immediate need is getting back control of your IT budgets. But it’s not just like this is the end goal. It’s really Mirantis OpenStack is also laying the foundation then for the AI strategy of various organizations so as to leverage, you know, the efficiency gains that we have seen all across the industry.

Swapnil Bhartiya: If you look at, you know, your migration tool, how much dependency is there on VMware’s VDDK and how much does that matter for teams planning to migrate away?

Cristian Klein: This is an excellent and very timely question. So just to give a bit of context, VMware recently pulled a famous library, VDDK, from the public. And this used to be a library that we ourselves were using, but also other suppliers in order to migrate customers off VMware and onto open standards virtualization platforms. What we did is that we essentially developed Cleanhouse, our own VDDK replacement library. Which we then plugged in our migration tool. So our migration tool can either use our VDDK replacement or it can use the actual VDDK in case the customers still have access to it. But the point is that no matter what is the situation of customer, whether they have access to VDDK or not, we can provide them with a VDDK-free migration path from VMware onto Mirantis OpenStack.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Based on your experience with customers, which VMware capabilities do teams want or expect to keep, such as live VM migration and high availability? And how does your MOSK handle those?

Cristian Klein: Yeah, so the capabilities we mostly heard about is ease of use. So there needs to be some kind of user interface in order to make all of the features discoverable. And of course we have this in Mirantis. They also expect, however, to be able to automate their VM operations at scale using Terraform, OpenTofu, Ansible, and things like that. And of course, that’s also possible with Mirantis OpenStack. They also expect live migration, for example, to be able to do firmware updates on a server level, to be able to move the VMs from one server to another so as to maintain a server. And that, of course, they also get with Mirantis OpenStack. And there I have something very exciting to announce, that with the latest version, we actually support parallel streams for live migration, which means that live migration operations better use the network bandwidth available and complete Way faster in order to meet the expectations of VMware customers. And finally, they expect high availability. So for example, if a server fails, then they expect that the VM be restarted on a different server, potentially on a different data center. And also they expect dynamic resource balancing so that in case there is a server which is facing too much CPU overcommitment, there should be something that is balancing VMs across servers so as to maintain a leveled load. And of course, in Mirantis, we have dynamic resource scheduling, which ensures that this is happening.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Now they have decided to move to Mirantis. They have started the work with you. They have done, you know, the workshop that you’re doing. Once the workloads have moved, what does Day-2 operations look like on MOSK? And who does that work? And what has been their feedback so far?

Cristian Klein: Well, hopefully Day-2 operations looks very boring. I mean, let’s be very honest. Nobody is excited about having to spin up new virtual machines. Nobody is excited about having to live migrate virtual machines. People usually have to operate at a way higher level in their organization. Virtualization level is just something that kind of needs to happen, but it’s usually not business differentiating. So hopefully Day-2 operation is that they don’t really notice anything. They use the same DNS names to reach their applications. Their applications are still working with the same performance. Databases are still responding properly and are highly available, and so on. Now, of course, there will be a few selected users which will still need to interact. So they might notice that the user interface has slightly changed, but, you know, they will quickly adapt to that. They might have to rewrite some of their Terraform scripts in order not to use VMware primitives, but use OpenStack primitives. But again, thanks to, you know, everybody now uses some kind of, some form of AI, either Claude or ChatGPT, those can be rewritten within hours. And so hopefully they will find themselves pretty much at home and notice that there is a capability, there is a clear capability parity between what they were used to in the VMware world and what they get with Mirantis OpenStack.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Most of the time when we look at open source, it may look like, yes, in general, if you look at open source, pure open source, there is no vendor lock-in, you should be able to move. That is not the reality, though. A lot of commercialization happens, vendor lock-in can happen with open source as well. So how do you look at it and how do you want to ensure that just because they’re moving away from VMware to Mirantis, they’re not just changing one lock with another lock?

Cristian Klein: That’s really an excellent question. The point I was trying to highlight though is that we are not only building on top of open source, but also exposing open infrastructure APIs. So essentially our customers, it depends a little bit who. We have 3 personas when it comes to our product. It’s the users, it’s the administrators, and it’s operators. Administrators and users, they interact directly with the OpenStack UI and the OpenStack API. So there is very little possibility for us to do any kind of vendor lock-in there because it’s essentially, well, whatever OpenStack distribution out there you’re taking, well, we We enhanced it with over 300 patches in order to make sure that it’s more resilient when operated at scale. But otherwise, we are not giving you any proprietary API. We’re not locking you in. So we believe we have the better OpenStack out there because, like I said, we have productized 15 years of operational experience, failures, security, whatnot into Mirantis OpenStack. But that being said, we cannot keep you locked just because of that. Now, when it comes to the OpenStack operators, so those who are updating OpenStack and things like that, we actually did something very clever architecturally. We are running OpenStack as if it were an application on a Kubernetes underlay. So this means that essentially everybody out there can reuse their cloud-native skills in order to observe, troubleshoot, investigate, and so on, OpenStack. So the point I’m trying to make is that we are building on open source, we are building on open APIs, we are building on cloud-native skills, which are vendor-neutral, in order to— basically what we are doing is that we have a significantly lower leverage to lock the customer in. We want our customers to stay in because we believe we have the better offer and the one that gives them more control over their IT strategy and their IT spending. And not because we are going to be locking them in for the future. And this is just part of our DNA. We’re not doing it because we are altruistic or anything like that. It’s just that we believe that infrastructure and AI should be open and based on open standards.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Cristian, thank you so much for joining me.

Cristian Klein: Thank you for having me.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Of course. Yeah, share these insights. Of course, those who are watching, please go if you are also looking at migrating or moving away from VMware, please go and check mirantis.com. And Cristian, once again, thank you for your time, and I look forward to chatting with you again. Thank you.

Cristian Klein: Thank you.