Having a Plan B is table stakes for any IT team. Rather than waiting for a storm to hit, IT professionals map out options and build strategies to ensure business continuity. This may involve embracing redundancies or testing new tools for future operations.

Following Broadcom’s late 2023 acquisition of VMware, numerous changes prompted customers and partners to reassess their strategies. Some delayed decisions by relying on existing VMware licenses, while others explored alternatives or ran redundancies to compare options.

Forrester predicted 20% of VMware customers would leave in 2024“exhausted by significant price hikes, degrading support, and mandatory subscription.”

Since Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, many IT teams are considering whether it’s the right time to explore VMware alternatives, says Steve Carter, Nutanix’s product marketing director.

“Many are reframing how to manage infrastructure, especially as demand for AI and cloud-native innovation escalates,” Carter said.

A few years ago, Gregg Lowe the CIO of Boyd Gaming Corp., operator of 28 hotel and casino properties across the US, was negotiating a fresh enterprise agreement with VMware prior to its acquisition, reported The Register.

“Boyd was using VMware as our hypervisor and Nutanix’s AHV,” said Lowe while interviewed at NEXT 2024. “I’ll call it a bake-off: May the best person win. We put our requirements out there and let things go head to head.”

While Boyd opted for Nutanix, Lowe emphasized that Boyd Gaming couldn’t afford business disruptions.

“We needed to plan out this migration,” he said. “It took about 18 months. It’s not something you just flip off a switch and you’re done. You need to plan. You need to focus to do the cutover. I do recognize some companies are probably easier than ours to go ahead and do the migration. But again, I still think it takes that commitment, that effort, and that reliance on each other to say, ‘this is what we’re doing.’”

While Boyd Gaming switched from VMware to Nutanix, others choose to run two hypervisors for resilience against threats and scalability, Carter explained.
“Organizations can maintain high-risk parts of their legacy VMware infrastructure while exploring how an alternative hypervisor can run business-critical applications and build new capabilities,” said Carter.

When vendor shakeups occur, CIOs and IT leaders immediately think about resiliency. Vendor allegiance – once critical for many organizations due both to convenience and loyalty – has become a company liability for many.

Additionally, the sheer amount of options available and today’s demand for more flexibility and hyper-customized user experiences require IT leaders to think more innovatively.

Reveal the best of both worlds

Carter noted that many VMware customers have invested in its solutions for decades but now seek modernization for greater agility, scalability, and cloud-native environments. The disruption from VMware’s acquisition has led many to reconsider their virtualization strategies and explore new options.

“By running two hypervisors, companies can build a hybrid infrastructure that maintains legacy systems and learn what’s the best way to handle new demands,” Carter said.

Carter explained that companies often run two hypervisors due to past mergers or acquisitions, where legacy systems exist across both environments rather than intentional implementation. However, this setup can offer a head start.

He stressed that migrating to a new hypervisor requires careful planning and vendor support to ensure smooth execution and build IT team confidence. Notwithstanding, running two hypervisors can provide valuable resilience and help companies modernize while retaining legacy systems that still offer value and learning what works best.

“The aim is to manage present needs and be able to enlist new capabilities to meet future demands,” Carter said.

It’s the ongoing challenge of integrating legacy systems and applications with next-gen technologies and solutions. Which Carter said is particularly relevant as businesses embrace and evolve hybrid multicloud operations for a future where they can manage resources and workloads across on-premises and public cloud services.

Rene Van Den Bedem, principal technical program manager at Microsoft Azure, noted the benefits clients are seeing by running VMware and Nutanix together on Azure public cloud.

“The main requirement is having an Azure landing zone, and then you can build whatever service that you want on it,” he told The Forecast.

“I think we’re going to see more of that. Typically, customers do like to have one hypervisor of choice, but that’s a legacy on-prem way of thinking. I think the world is changing.”

Learn about AHV and the Nutanix Cloud Platform or explore the steps for migrating to Nutanix from VMware and the VMware to Nutanix Promotion.

Disclaimer: Nutanix, Inc. is not affiliated with VMware by Broadcom or Broadcom.

Ken Kaplan is Editor in Chief for The Forecast by Nutanix. Find him on @kenekaplan.