At the end of every year many individuals try their hand at predicting trends for the upcoming year. How often do these predictions come true, I cannot say. By the time anyone thinks to evaluate the previous year’s predictions, the next round of forecasting begins.
However, the end of 2024 feels different from a forecasting perspective for one simple reason. Forces are already in play, that would seem to make one prediction very easy to make for 2025. Specifically, the emergence of cross-hypervisor virtual machine migration capabilities in data protection software has already begun to take hold.
The Move Off VMware Begins in Earnest in 2025
Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware in late 2023 and subsequent licensing changes sent a shockwave through all size organizations. However, many organizations found themselves in no position or poor position to move off VMware in 2024. Reasons many organizations did not move off VMware included one or more of the following:
- They locked in their VMware software licensing for one or more years prior to Broadcom changing VMware’s software licensing model.
- They had no viable alternative hypervisor in mind.
- They had not tested alternative hypervisors with their applications.
- They had not identified any software tools or formally made any plans to facilitate migrating their applications to another hypervisor.
- They had insufficient or no budget and staff to make such a move.
Fast forward to the end of 2024 and many of these concerns have been addressed, in whole or in part.
- Existing VMware software licenses have begun to expire for organizations forcing them either to re-up or migrate off VMware.
- Alternative hypervisors have added more features to become more viable VMware alternatives.
- Organizations have explored, tested, and validated running their applications and workloads on other hypervisors.
- Organizations have identified tools and made formal plans to move.
- They reserved a budget and allocated staff time to make this move.
The fact that all forces are in play by the growing number of cross-hypervisor data migration features being announced by technology providers.
Cross-hypervisor Data Migration Functionality Takes Center Stage
Cross-hypervisor virtual machine (VM) migration does not necessarily represent a “new” feature in many software products. Most data protection software has offered such cross-hypervisor VM migration functionality for many years. However, providers usually present this functionality as part of their “restore and recovery” capabilities.
The big differences between past years and what I expect will happen in 2025 show up on two fronts.
First, organizations will utilize this feature much more aggressively than in the past.
While data protection software offered this feature, it remains unclear how much organizations used or depended upon it. Now that organizations anticipate actively using it to migrate production VMs, they will scrutinize this feature more carefully.
For instance, they will:
- Analyze what other hypervisors or cloud platforms the feature supports and how well it supports them.
- More critically consider how quickly it restores VMs and the data, applications, and workloads running on them to these other hypervisor and cloud platforms.
- Evaluate if they can restore VMs back to the original VMware environment should they need to failback.
Second, organizations will examine how much effort they must exert, how much expertise they need, and how much money they must spend to adopt it.
The number of VMware virtual machines that any organization needs to migrate will vary. However, many organizations may need to migrate hundreds, thousands, and perhaps tens of thousands of VMs.
In these circumstances, organizations need a solution that can easily and effectively migrate this number of VMs at scale.
HYCU Jumps the Gun on the 2025 Trend of VM Migrations
Seeing these forces in play, HYCU has jumped the gun on this likely 2025 trend by today announcing much more robust VM migration capabilities as part of R-Cloud. Some key features that HYCU introduced into this release of R-Cloud include:
- Expanded abilities to migrate between multiple hypervisors and cloud platforms. They include AWS, AWS Gov Cloud, Azure, Azure Gov Cloud, Azure Local, Nutanix, VMware and physical servers.
- Simplified data migration planning. R-Cloud automatically discovers VMware VMs and the applications on them. Once discovered, it prepares them to be migrated to the platform of the organization’s choosing.
- Unifying data protection, disaster recovery, and VM migration. Organizations often need to obtain different software to protect their data, perform disaster recoveries, and migrate VMs. Organizations may now realistically explore consolidating these various tasks using HYCU R-Cloud.
Platform Independence Represents the Ideal
Many organizations now feel the pinch of Broadcom’s VMware software licensing changes and seek to quickly get off it. In that respect, HYCU R-Cloud can certainly help almost any size organization achieve that objective almost immediately.
However, organizations willing to think more strategically may recognize that this situation may happen again. Simply moving all their VMs off VMware to another platform only potentially sets them up for another situation like this one. Once they re-host their VMs on an alternative hypervisor or another cloud, could the situation of the new provider suddenly changing its pricing happen again? The short answer is “Yes.”
In this respect, HYCU R-cloud provides organizations insurance from being boxed in again. It does more than just giving organizations flexibility to migrate their VMs off VMware. It offers them flexibility to move VMs to whichever platform – hypervisor or cloud – makes the most sense for their business while also simultaneously achieving platform independence.
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Note: HYCU, Inc., is a client of DCIG.