Don’t just replace VMware; tune up your infrastructure
Finding a suitable VMware alternative has become a priority for many IT organizations, especially following Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware. Rather than swapping out hypervisors, IT should seize this opportunity to reevaluate and modernize the entire infrastructure, adopting an integrated software-defined approach that optimizes resource efficiency, scalability, and readiness for emerging technologies, such as enterprise AI.
Beyond simple hypervisor replacement
Replacing a hypervisor without addressing underlying infrastructure limitations provides temporary relief. Issues such as siloed resource management, inefficient storage operations, and limited scalability remain, continuing to increase operational complexity and costs.
Adopting a comprehensive software-defined infrastructure ensures seamless integration, flexibility, and efficient scaling—critical factors for handling modern workloads, including legacy applications, VDI, and AI workloads.
Preparing infrastructure for enterprise AI
The rapid adoption of AI increases demands on existing IT infrastructure. AI workloads require extensive computational resources, high-speed data storage access, advanced GPU support, and low-latency networking. Traditional infrastructures, with their inflexible storage, compute, and network architectures, fail to meet these dynamic and intensive requirements.
Due to these software inefficiencies, IT teams are forced to create separate infrastructures for AI workloads. These new infrastructures require dedicated servers, specialized storage systems, and separate networking, thereby creating additional silos to manage. This fragmented approach increases operational complexity and duplication of resources.
A modern, software-defined infrastructure integrates flexible storage management, GPU pooling, and dynamic resource allocation capabilities. These advanced features enable IT teams to consolidate AI and traditional workloads, eliminating unnecessary silos and allowing resources to scale smoothly as AI workloads evolve.
What to look for in software-defined infrastructure
When selecting a VMware alternative and transitioning to a software-defined model, consider the following essential capabilities:
Integrated storage management
Choose solutions that manage storage directly within the infrastructure software stack, removing the need for external SAN or NAS devices. This integration streamlines data management, optimizes data placement, minimizes latency, and simplifies operational complexity.
No compromise storage performance
The solution should deliver storage performance equal to or exceeding that of traditional three-tier architectures using dedicated all-flash arrays. Modern software-defined infrastructure must leverage the speed and efficiency of NVMe-based flash storage to optimize data paths and minimize latency. This ensures consistently high performance, meeting or surpassing the demands of the most intensive workloads, including databases, VDI, and enterprise AI applications, without compromising simplicity or scalability.
Advanced GPU support for AI
Look beyond basic GPU support traditionally used for VDI environments. Modern infrastructure solutions should offer advanced GPU features, including GPU clustering, GPU sharing, and efficient GPU virtualization explicitly designed for AI workloads.
Efficient resource usage
Prioritize infrastructure that supports precise and dynamic resource allocation. Solutions should offer granular control over CPU, memory, storage, and networking, reducing wasted resources and simplifying management tasks.
Efficiency is critical due to the high cost of GPUs. Don’t waste these valuable resources on unnecessary virtualization overhead. To maximize your investment, modern solutions must deliver performance as close to bare-metal GPU speeds as possible, ensuring AI workloads achieve optimal throughput and responsiveness without resource inefficiencies.
High-performance networking
Evaluate infrastructures that feature specialized networking protocols optimized for internal node communications. Look for active-active network configurations, low latency, and high bandwidth capabilities to ensure consistent performance during intensive operations and in the event of node failures.
Global inline deduplication and data efficiency
Ensure the infrastructure offers global inline deduplication capabilities to reduce storage consumption, beneficial in environments with substantial VM or AI workload duplication. Confirm that deduplication does not negatively impact system performance.
Ask yourself when the vendor introduced deduplication into its infrastructure software. If it added this feature several years after the platform’s initial release, it is likely a bolt-on introducing additional processing overhead and negatively impacting performance. Conversely, a platform that launched with deduplication will be tightly integrated, optimized for efficiency, and unlikely to degrade system performance.
Simplified management and automation
Choose solutions that provide comprehensive management interfaces with extensive automation capabilities across provisioning, configuration, and scaling. Automated operations reduce manual intervention, accelerate deployments, and minimize human error.
Enhanced resiliency and high availability
Opt for infrastructures with robust redundancy and availability features such as distributed data mirroring, independent backup copies, and intelligent automated fail-over. These capabilities are critical for maintaining continuous operations, even during hardware failures or scheduled maintenance.
IT should evaluate solutions capable of providing inline protection from multiple simultaneous hardware failures (such as drives or entire servers) without resorting to expensive triple mirroring or even higher replication schemes. Solutions that achieve advanced redundancy without significant storage overhead help maintain data integrity, reduce infrastructure costs, and simplify operational management.
Evaluating your VMware alternative
Transitioning from VMware provides an ideal opportunity to rethink your infrastructure strategy holistically. A well-designed, software-defined infrastructure enables superior resource management, simplified operational processes, and improved scalability, preparing your organization for current needs and future innovations.
By carefully evaluating VMware alternatives through the lens of these critical infrastructure capabilities, IT organizations can significantly enhance their infrastructure agility, efficiency, and ability to support emerging technology demands, particularly enterprise AI.
Don’t view your VMware exit merely as a hypervisor replacement. Use it as a strategic catalyst to modernize your infrastructure. Storage is another key concern when selecting a VMware alternative. Check out “Comparing VMware Alternative Storage” to dive deeper.
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