VMWare licensing changes

The main change to VMWare’s licensing is a move away from perpetual licences and to a subscription model.

Under Broadcom’s ownership, the supplier has also stripped back the number of licences in favour of bundles and dropped some standalone products. This includes dropping the free edition of the VMware vSphere ESXi hypervisor.

For storage, vSAN Max – which disaggregated storage from the wider vSphere platform, and was only released in 2023 – will no longer be available as a standalone product.

Storage services will now be either bundled into VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and its on-premise vSphere Foundation offering, or as capacity-based add-ons. Firms that want to use third-party storage can still do so, with support for third parties bolstered in autumn 2024.

But customers will still need to use and pay for vSAN, not least because it is needed if you want to create management domain clusters.

According to VMWare, the aim is to create a simplified pricing and licensing structure, with VCF and vSphere customers now having access to all of VMWare’s storage products. This will see the number of vSAN editions cut from five to just one, as well as capacity-based pricing.

The changes will leave some organisations facing higher costs, with a minimum licensed capacity of 8TB per CPU for vSphere. For VCF, core licences include 1TB of raw capacity, although customers will pay VMWare subscriptions based on the number of CPU cores they license.

In the case of firms that use vSAN on a standalone basis, they now face a requirement to either buy into vSphere or VCF or move to an alternative storage platform altogether.

What is vSAN?

VMWare’s vSAN is a storage virtualisation technology, used primarily (but not only) to support VMWare virtual machines.

The vSAN software brings together local server storage and direct-attached storage into a single virtual pool and offers an alternative to a hardware-based storage area network.

With vSAN, storage from the pool is available to any host in the vSAN cluster, and to any ESXi hyperviser within the vSphere cluster. This offers better storage utilisation, management and reduced costs.

At a minimum, organisations that want to move away from vSphere will need to migrate their storage. Others might want to move to other storage suppliers, especially if VMWare’s model will increase their costs, even if they retain VMWare’s virtual machines.

Migration considerations

If CIOs want to move from vSAN, they have two options: migrate to a new virtualisation provider, with its storage technology, or move to a third-party storage virtual SAN.

Here, firms that already store their data outside VMWare might have a slightly easier path if they move away from VMWare. Much will depend on how deeply VMWare technologies are embedded into their operations.

If an organisation plans to move from VMWare to another virtualisation platform, they will need to migrate their storage in any case, because running vSAN on a standalone basis is no longer an option.

This involves standing up the new servers and storage environment and then exporting the VM virtual disk files (VMDKs). IT teams can then import these into the new VMs or use the new virtualisation supplier’s migration tool.

If firms use vSAN as a standalone product, they will need to migrate to an alternative software virtualisation or software-defined storage architecture. Again, the migration path will depend on the tools and support offered by the new supplier.

And if organisations plan to move off vSAN but stay with VMWare, this is possible, but they will need to keep vSAN on their systems for management.

In VCF 9, VMware’s vSphere Virtual Volumes (vVols) offers improved integration for third-party storage, with both NetApp and Pure Storage committed to support the new version of vVols. This is likely to be most useful to businesses with very large, typically petabyte-scale storage requirements, and which are less likely to rely on vSAN alone anyway.

Regardless of the options they choose, IT teams will need to ensure they have properly configured hardware or cloud capacity – including enough storage for copies of VMDKs during the migration, and a thorough understanding of their VMWare and vSAN environments and the new platform.

There will be differences between platforms in features, performance and dependencies, as well as how management tools work. Some of these differences will be critical. However, a good-quality migration tool or even use of outside consultants will smooth the process.

Altneratives for vSAN

Fortunately, for organisations that do need to replace vSAN, there is a wide range of alternatives for storage virtualisation and entire virtualised environments.

Datacore’s SANsymphony, for example, works with any hypervisor, including VMWare, supports direct-attached storage and SANs, and extends to HCI nodes.

StorMagic’s SvSAN is a hyper-converged storage platform, which the supplier claims runs on all x86 servers and storage types. SvSAN supports VMs and containers, giving flexibility to firms that plan to run containerised applications, and high availability is built in.

Nutanix’s Unified Storage is not just a SAN replacement, but a storage architecture that works across local, edge and cloud locations. Nutanix can deploy as dedicated storage, or hyper-converged architecture, and supports file, object and volume services. Its AOS Storage is its enterprise-focused software-defined SAN and NAS replacement.

StarWind is an HCI supplier with a virtual SAN – StarWind VSAN – aimed at SMEs, which it describes as “an Uber for IT storage”. StarWind offers a free version of VSAN, in “self-supported” mode.

For organisations that plan a wholescale migration from VMWare, Scale Computing offers hardware and software options, and claims it is at least 25% cheaper than VMWare.

Verge IO is another supplier that supports users who want to migrate entirely from VMWare. Its VergeOS includes the integrated VergeFS vSAN, supporting both existing SAN storage and storage virtualisation. However, VergeFS does not operate as a standalone vSAN.

And, for CIOs who want to stay with a mainstream hardware supplier, Dell vXRAIL and HPE SimpliVity are both hyper-converged architectures designed to simplify VM deployment, including storage.