Virtual machines redefined how organizations used their resources and deployed applications, and VMware has been an undisputed leader in this field for decades. However, VMware’s recent acquisition by Broadcom has pushed companies to consider alternatives to VMware, and raised interest in modern virtualization, or the ability to manage virtual machines (VMs) on Kubernetes.
This shift has prompted enterprises to seek VMware alternatives that combine VMs with enterprise-grade storage, such as Enterprise-Grade Storage Built for Red Hat OpenShift, that ensure business continuity and the evolution of their virtualization environment. In this article, we’ll look at top VMware alternatives and assess their potential to meet the demands of modern-day enterprises.
What is Virtualization?
Virtualization allows you to run multiple operating systems or applications on a single physical machine. It does this by abstracting the physical resources—CPU, memory, and storage—into logical units that are efficient and easier to manage.
What is modern virtualization?
Modern virtualization is a virtualization environment built on modern architectures like Kubernetes. This approach has several benefits:
- Ability to manage containerized applications and VMs from a single platform, reducing operational overheads and improving efficiency.
- The Kubernetes-based approach enables better resource optimization across containerized applications and virtual machines, leading to better infrastructure utilization.
- Lastly, this enables enterprises to rehost, refactor, or rebuild applications running in VMs without disrupting their existing workflows.
These advancements have increased the capabilities of virtualized environments to run more complex and powerful workloads with greater efficiency and flexibility.
Portworx’s modern virtualization solutions offer a unified storage and data management platform that can support VMs and containers running on any Kubernetes platform. This allows enterprises to gradually modernize their infrastructure while reaping the benefits of both worlds—maintaining the stability and compatibility of their existing VM-based applications while embracing the agility and efficiency of containerization.
Learn more about Modern Virtualization Trends, Challenges, and Solutions.
Importance of VMware and Virtualization
VMware’s suite of products, including popular offerings like vSphere, vCenter, and ESXi, allow enterprises to run and manage virtual servers easily. It also offers many cloud products, allowing enterprises to seamlessly extend their on-premises data centers to the cloud.
Let us look at some of the benefits of VMware which made it a popular choice:
- vSphere became an industry benchmark for server virtualization. Its robust features, including live migrations, load balancing, high availability, and fault tolerance, made it a class apart from competitors.
- VMware also introduced the virtual machine file system, a high-performance storage cluster that enabled storage access for VMs and offered live migration and HA.
- VMware consistently innovated and introduced new features and products, such as vRealize for cloud management and Tanzu for Kubernetes..
These offerings, combined with innovation and a deep understanding of enterprise requirements, made VMware the go-to choice for organizations. As a result, VMware became deeply ingrained in the IT strategies of countless businesses worldwide.
Why Should You Consider VMware Alternatives?
VMware has been a cornerstone of IT strategy, but Broadcom’s recent acquisition of VMware has prompted many organizations to explore VMware alternatives. Additionally, the industry is rapidly moving towards containerization, with Kubernetes becoming the de facto standard for container orchestration.
Furthermore, businesses are increasingly adopting a multi-cloud strategy and require solutions that offer integration across different cloud providers and on-prem infrastructure. VMware alternatives can provide more flexible and cost-effective options.
Key Criteria for Evaluation VMware Alternatives
It’s essential to have a structured evaluation approach when you’re looking for VMware alternatives, as each organization has a specific need and priority. Here are a few factors to help you choose the best alternative that not only matches VMware’s capabilities but also future-proofs your organization’s cloud journey.
Cost
Cost is often the primary driver when you’re exploring new alternatives, but it’s critical to go beyond just the initial pricing:
- Understand the pricing model and evaluate whether the pricing structure – whether it’s per CPU, per user, or subscription-based – aligns with your usage pattern and budget.
- Consider costs for advanced features and support tiers.
- Consider the total cost of ownership (TCO), including the cost of implementation, training, and maintenance.
Performance
Performance is another critical consideration, as it will ensure that your virtualized environments can meet the demands of your application and users.
- Evaluate how efficiently and effectively the solution uses CPU, memory, storage, and networking resources, and understand the various levers it gives you to optimize the performance.
- Look for comparative benchmarks that measure the solution’s performance in scenarios similar to your use case.
- If you have specialized workloads like AI/ML, ensure the solution meets their high-performance needs.
Scalability
Remember that the VMware alternative you choose should be able to grow with your organization. Hence, scalability becomes a critical criterion.
- Understand the maximum number of VMs and nodes supported in a cluster, account, or region and evaluate based on your future needs.
- Evaluate storage and network scalability to ensure it can handle growing storage needs and manage complex network topologies.
- Ensure enough features and options for automatically scaling resources based on demand.
Ease of Use
When choosing a newer solution, you must consider its usability, as it can affect operational efficiency and user productivity.
- Assess the various interface options available – GUI, CLI, and API – and their intuitiveness and understand the learning curve associated with each.
- Evaluate the support for custom scripting and integration with other tools to help automate your workflows.
- Consider the ease of initial setup, regular maintenance, and upgrades.
Compatibility
Ensuring your new alternative is compatible with your existing infrastructure and tools is critical.
- Check if the solution supports your existing hardware, as running your operating systems and applications is critical.
- Evaluate how this new solution integrates with your existing tools and understand how it functions.
- If you already have a multi-cloud or hybrid environment, assess how well this new solution can work across different environments.
Support and Community
The level of support and resources is critical, especially when you face issues. Based on your business’s criticality, look for support and community options.
- Evaluate the support plans and tiers, along with the quality and availability of support options.
- An active community can be very helpful when you’re troubleshooting issues, as well as for knowledge sharing.
- Assess the clarity and comprehensiveness of the official documentation, as your team will use it to ensure smooth operations.
Evaluating these critical criteria for choosing a VMware alternative can help you make an informed decision that aligns with your organization’s needs, budget, and strategy. Note that the criteria may vary depending on your specific requirements, so prioritize these based on your organization’s context.
Check out Modern Virtualization Insights from Portworx, Red Hat, and CDW guide to learn more about modern virtualization tools and platforms.
Top VMware Alternatives
Below are two top VMware alternatives that cater to modern needs. These alternatives support running workloads on the Kubernetes platform and provide a path for a cloud-native approach to VM-based workloads.
KubeVirt
What is KubeVirt?
KubeVirt is an open-source project that extends Kubernetes functionality to provide virtual machine management on top of Kubernetes. With KubeVirt, organizations can run traditional VM workloads alongside containerized applications within a Kubernetes cluster.
It advances Kubernetes API by introducing additional virtualization resources of Kind VirtualMachine as CRDs. It uses KVM behind the scenes as a backend hypervisor, allowing you to run any VM that is compatible with KVM including Linux, Windows and FreeBSD.
Key Features
- VM Lifecycle Management: KubeVirt provides a declarative API for creating, managing, and deleting VMs. You can define VM configurations using Kubernetes CRDs.
- Resource Allocation: KubeVirt uses the Kubernetes resource management system to allocate CPU, memory, and storage resources to VMs, providing the same granular resource management as containers.
- Hotplug: With KubeVirt, users can add or remove disks, network interfaces, and other devices from VMs without shutting them down.
- Storage: With KubeVirt, VMs can use Kubernetes PVs, PVCs, and other supported backends like Ceph and NFS to manage their storage needs. This ensures data persistence and provides snapshots and cloning VMs capabilities, which can help quickly revert to the previous state.
- Live Migration: KubeVirt supports Live Migration of VMs, which helps migrate running VMs between nodes within the cluster without downtime.
Advantages
- Unified management: KubeVirt allows for managing VMs and containers together on Kubernetes, which can simplify operations and reduce the complexity of handling heterogeneous tools and platforms for management. This also makes it easy for enterprises to migrate legacy applications to Kubernetes.
- Scalability: KubeVirt scales as the Kubernetes cluster does. It also supports a large number of VMs, making it a good choice for major deployments.
- Simplified CI/CD: KubeVirt is native to Kubernetes, simplifying the CI/CD process from application development to running in Kubernetes; the same CI/CD tools used for containers can integrate and deliver VM-based applications.
Disadvantages
- Performance Overhead: While KubeVirt supports running VM-based workloads on containers, it also requires running multiple resources to make them available. It acts as an additional abstraction layer between the VM and underlying hardware, adding overhead to performance, specifically for Intensive or I/O-bound applications.
- Limitations: While KubeVirt is continuously evolving, it may still have some limitations compared to more mature virtualization platforms. For instance, KubeVirt uses Kubernetes networking plugins (CNI) for VM networking, which may not fully support all advanced networking needs of VMs. This can affect the availability of certain features or the level of support for specific use cases, and its ecosystem is still growing but not as large or mature as others.
- Complexity: When you run VMs on Kubernetes, organizations new to Kubernetes need to invest in learning Kubernetes, which adds complexity and a steep learning curve compared to traditional methods to run VMs
Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization
What is Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization?
Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization is an enterprise-grade feature of Red Hat OpenShift that extends Kubernetes to run VMs alongside containerized applications. Built on the KubeVirt project, it integrates virtualization capabilities directly into the OpenShift platform, providing a cohesive environment for deploying, managing, and scaling hybrid workloads in a cloud-native manner.
Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization vs KubeVirt
In 2020, Red Hat announced the general availability (GA) of Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization , based on upstream KubeVirt. While both enable virtualization within Kubernetes, Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization offers additional enterprise features, support, and integration.
Key Features
- Integrated Management: With Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, you get a unified interface for deploying and monitoring both VMs and containers within OpenShift, allowing you to easily shift VM-based workloads into Kubernetes.
- Scalability and High Availability: Machine management features included with Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization enable autoscaling based on workload policies and machine health checks. High availability configurations are further supported, ensuring that workloads remain accessible even in the event of node failures.
- Kubernetes-Native Virtualization: Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization is based on KubeVirt, which makes it a Kubernetes-native virtualization option. It allows you to leverage all features and capabilities of the Kubernetes ecosystem, such as Persistent Storage and provisioning of VM disk images using the Containerized Data Importer (CDI), which automates importing, cloning, and uploading disk images.
- Security: Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization meets various industry compliance standards and certifications, which is crucial for organizations in regulated sectors like finance, healthcare, and government. It also provides Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) Enforcement, which provides mandatory access control with strict access at the kernel level, isolating VMs and containers from each other and from the host system. This minimizes the risk of unauthorized access and limits the potential impact of compromised applications.
- Migration Tools: Red Hat Openshift provides VM import and export tooling to import VMs from other virtualization platforms, e.g., VMware RHV, easing the transition to OpenShift Virtualization. It also has a migration toolkit for Virtualization or MTV, assisting in migrating workloads at scale with minimal downtime and supporting the planning and execution phases.
Advantages
- Unified platform: Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization provides a unified platform for seamlessly managing containers and virtual machines (VMs). This integration simplifies operations by allowing administrators to use a single set of tools and processes across all workloads.
- OpenShift Ecosystem: Organizations can use a wide range of tools, services, and integrations that enhance functionality within the OpenShift ecosystem. Streamlining the whole CI/CD and operational process in place. Thus reducing cost and time in developer productivity and
- Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud: OpenShift Virtualization can be deployed on-premises, in public clouds, or in hybrid configurations, offering flexibility in infrastructure choices. It provides a consistent platform across different environments, ensuring that workloads behave consistently regardless of the underlying infrastructure.
- Enterprise-Grade Support and Reliability: Backed by Red Hat’s extensive support services, organizations benefit from professional assistance, security updates, and patches. This ensures high reliability and uptime for mission-critical applications, with the confidence that expert help is available when needed.
Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization vs Red Hat Virtualization (RHV)
Red Hat Virtualization (RHV) is currently in maintenance or extended support for existing customers only. Red Hat’s current virtualization offering is Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization.
Modern Virtualization Solutions with Portworx
Portworx is a critical component for platform engineering teams running on Red Hat OpenShift. Portworx provides a common persistent storage layer for both containers and virtual machines enabling key functions such as synchronous DR, HA, backup, and automated operations. Learn more about modern virtualization with Portworx and Red Hat OpenShift.