Disaster Recovery Journal Fall 2024

Set Realistic Expectations When Evaluating VMware vSphere Alternatives Broadcom’s licensing changes and price increases to VMware software have put organizations in the market searching for alternative solu tions. In so doing, organiza tions will quickly uncover multiple alternatives. This situation makes it incumbent upon organiza tions to set realistic expec tations when evaluating VMware vSphere alternatives. Identifying a suitable replace ment for VMware vSphere will depend heavily upon how many VMware software fea tures an organization uses. If an organization simply uses basic VMware vSphere features, they will likely find multiple suitable alternatives. In this case, they may be able to switch with relatively ease and perhaps even minimal dis ruption to their IT operations. Conversely, any organi zation that utilizes multiple VMware vSphere advanced features must proceed much more carefully. These organi zations may need to consider everything from how to migrate workloads to the alternative to how they will now support a hybrid cloud environment. v

events. This has led to at least one alternative solu tion offering anomaly detec tion that examines data for suspicious behavior. Some also integrate with Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) platforms to centralize monitoring and analysis of suspicious activities. Consideration #3: Integration and Support for Features in General-purpose Public Clouds This consideration repre sents perhaps the biggest area of differentiation between VMware software and alterna tive solutions. VMware sup ports and offers deployment options in general-purpose public cloud providers. The VMware integra tion with these cloud provid ers facilitates the creation of hybrid clouds. In so doing, organizations may run their applications, VMs, and/or workloads on-premises or in their preferred cloud, as needed. Few alternative solutions yet provide such extensive integration with multiple gen eral-purpose cloud providers, if they support it at all. If they do offer it, they may support one general-purpose cloud or they offer their own purpose built cloud. This cloud inte gration facilitates creating a hybrid cloud though only on the ones supported by the pro vider.

do restore vSphere data and VMs from their current back ups to the new alternative plat form. Alternatively, some organi zations may continue running VMware vSphere Standard but host it on an alternative platform. Broadcom has con solidated much of VMware’s enterprise software into two product bundles. However, VMware vSphere Standard remains available as a stand alone product. This product may contain the features an organization wants or needs. This standalone option gives an organization the flex ibility to license and continue using the VMware vSphere Standard hypervisor. Some alternative solutions can then host the VMware vSphere hypervisor. They then comple ment it by delivering the DR and high availability (HA) fea tures they offer. In so doing, the alternative solution replaces some VMware software fea tures only available in the new VMware product bundles. Finally, some VMware vSphere alternatives include their own data migration util ity to facilitate the transition. However, capabilities of each alternative solution’s data migration utility vary by prod uct. In some cases, organiza tions must manually configure and manage the migration from VMware vSphere to the alternative solution. In other cases, organizations may test the data and VM migrations and even do failovers and fail backs.

Consideration #2: Use of Cybersecurity Technologies to Protect Data and Users All enterprises now rou tinely deal with ransom¬ware events and bad actors both inside and outside their com pany. This frequent occurrence has made it imperative that organizations evaluate how a VMware vSphere alternative protects them against such attacks. Here again, alternative solutions vary in their ability to equip enterprises to secure their environment. However, repelling more sophisticated cyberattacks often requires a solution to possess more advanced cybersecurity fea tures. The cybersecurity differ ences between available solu tions show up in multiple ways. For instance, enterprises may want the solution to encrypt data in-flight or at-rest. If so, organizations should beware. Not every solution supports in flight or at-rest encryption as an option. Other enterprises may want to ensure a second individual reviews certain manage¬ment tasks before they get com pleted. Still others may want to impede a ransomware attack by storing data in an immu table format. This requires the vSphere alternative to either write data in a WORM file form or on immutable object storage. Only a few solutions currently offer such function ality. Many enterprises also want to better monitor their environment for suspicious

Jerome Wendt, an AWS Certified Solutions Architect, is the president and founder of DCIG, LLC., a technology analyst firm. DCIG, LLC.,

focuses on providing competitive intel ligence for the enterprise data protection, data storage, disaster recovery, and cloud technology markets.

36 DISASTER RECOVERY JOURNAL | FALL 2024