Knowledgebase.

To determine how long migrating off VMware will take, businesses need to evaluate the following:

• Size and complexity of environment
• Your team’s familiarity with the infrastructure and targeted platform
• Application dependencies
• The amount of downtime your business can tolerate

The above answers will dictate whether your migration will take hours or weeks to months of planning, testing, and execution.

A commonly overlooked aspect is testing. Successful migrations are not simply moving workloads from one platform to another. Validating applications, services, integrations, and user access is essential. Without testing, something as simple as applications referencing IP addresses instead of FQDNs, can create unexpected challenges.

When evaluating your migration timeline, experience will be the final determining factor. Nothing can replace true, successful migration expertise.

After performing hundreds of migrations over the years, Acronis is typically our go-to solution for on-premise environments. Acronis is extremely flexible and supports many platforms, including alternative hypervisors, private cloud platforms, and public cloud providers.

With Acronis, businesses can choose from a variety of platforms including Proxmox, Nutanix AHV, Hyper-V, Virtuozzo, or a cloud-hosted environment that best fits their technical, operational, and financial requirements, without being locked into a single migration path.

No. You can often significantly reduce downtime during a migration, but eliminating it entirely isn't realistic. Your environment dependencies and requirements will dictate the length of downtime, as well as how much you have planned and the need to test. With careful planning, and perhaps help from an experienced migration team, you can minimize downtime and schedule it to have the least possible impact on business operations.

Minimal downtime is the goal, but your focus should be on a smooth, predictable transition with minimal disruption.

It depends. Recent rising hardware costs and the increasing volatility of global supply chains have shifted the “refresh hardware” conversation dramatically.

Many organizations have found that moving to the cloud is more cost-effective. Cloud service providers' economies of scale on the hardware they own lead to a much more reasonable unit cost for compute resources for you as the customer.

On-premises environments do have use cases, but organizations need to closely evaluate hardware costs, availability and deliverability, performance, and compliance needs.

Hypervisor migrations are a big decision. Migrations take months of planning, architecting, and execution, and you should closely evaluate the associated costs.

Partnering with a cloud service provider with migration expertise is worth considering. These cloud partners can ensure smooth operations before, during, and after the migration.

Possibly. Existing hardware, VMware licensing requirements, growth projections, and operational costs will show which option is cheaper.

Private cloud can be a cost-effective VMware alternative. With the rising VMware licensing costs, hardware availability for refreshes, redundant power, cooling, data center space, and ongoing maintenance, private cloud providers are a good option. They can deliver the flexibility and performance of a virtualized environment without the capital expense and operational responsibility of maintaining underlying infrastructure – resulting in a more predictable and scalable operating model for business users.

The easiest answer is to migrate workloads to a cloud-hosted environment. Moving to the cloud eliminates hardware refresh cycles and reduces ongoing maintenance. It also shifts your spending from CapEx to OpEx, which is more predictable. Cloud environments also allow businesses to scale resources as needed, so they pay only for the compute, storage, and performance they actually use.

Businesses should plan at least 6-9 months before their support contract ends. Use those months to evaluate all available options, including on-prem VMware alternatives such as:

• Microsoft Hyper-V
• Nutanix AHV
• Proxmox VE
• Virtuozzo
• Scale Computing
• Managed Private Cloud infrastructure solutions

Businesses need to consider factors such as budget, operational requirements, growth projections, long-term strategy, and even their own internal IT resources to make the best choice.

*Net3 has a proven history of working with customers who are evaluating VMware alternatives. With experienced engineers on staff, businesses can evaluate their options carefully and thoughtfully with Net3.

MSPs should first help clients understand their true cost of maintaining infrastructure before offering new infrastructure alternatives. Hardware is only part of the overall cost. Power-cooling, support contracts, backup infrastructure, disaster recovery, management overhead, and future refresh cycles all contribute to the bottom line. When businesses evaluate these costs together, they can make an informed decision about whether to refresh on-prem hardware, move workloads to the cloud, or adopt a hybrid strategy.

Migrating off VMware is not a one-size-fits-all approach. Every migration should start with a strategy that’s tailored to the client’s technical, operational, and financial goals.

Some organizations may benefit from a hardware refresh and new hypervisor, while others may benefit from a private cloud solution, hybrid architecture, or a phased migration strategy. MSPs need to consider factors such as application requirements, compliance needs, budget, growth plans, disaster recovery objectives, and internal IT resources.

Executing a migration is where having a trusted partner matters. At Net3, we act as an extension of our partners’ teams, bringing years of cloud experience, virtualization, and infrastructure expertise to every opportunity.

Net3 has successfully helped MSPs navigate:

• VMware migrations of small businesses
• Large, multi-system deployments
• Evaluating all VMware alternative options
• Architecting solutions
• Mitigating risks
• Developing migration roadmaps to align with business objectives

Backup and Disaster Recovery solutions that support more than VMware are very common today, and most leading backup/DR vendors support multiple hypervisors and virtualization platforms.

The challenge MSPs face isn't finding the solution; it's everything else that comes with a platform change. Most MSPs are simultaneously learning the new platform, new management tools, new operational processes, and, in some cases, a new DR strategy. All of these “new” items require time, training, testing, and dedicated internal resources.

* Net3 delivers value by helping MSPs successfully navigate VMware migrations, infrastructure modernization projects, and all the added challenges that come with a new platform – including best backup/DR solutions, implementation, and support.

Many disaster recovery solutions are available that are compatible with VMware alternatives. When choosing a DR solution, double-check your business requirements and needs, along with the solution's technical capabilities, to ensure it’s a good fit.

Yes, with a 3^rd party software/backup and DR solution. Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud is a great solution that Net3 uses with a lot of success. It can replicate many different virtualizations outside of VMware and directly integrates with and replicates Nutanix, Hyper-V, and Proxmox, just to name a few.

The best DR solution for virtualization is one that works best for:

• Your current environment

• Provides testing

• Provides accurate reporting

• Does not require additional hardware or appliances

The best DR solution helps your business maintain optimal efficiency while failing over to your virtual environment in the event of a disaster.

Every solution has benefits and drawbacks. Understanding them helps you decide what’s best for your business.

• Managed private cloud offers close approximation to running a local environment without the need to self-manage the infrastructure. But your business may need more sophisticated development or big data offerings from a hyperscaler.
• Local implementations like Nutanix offer more control, but your business may incur large capital costs and management responsibilities.
• Hyperscalers like Azure offer very sophisticated development tools, data analytics, and scale, but those come with associated costs, lack of support, and ecosystem lock-in.

1. Simplify the number of moving parts by grouping individual assets into “Application Groups”. This grouping lets you apply DR strategies at the group level and assess application risk. If you have 100 servers, evaluate each server’s criticality. This is a timely process, but it's time well spent when right-sizing your environment.

2. Now that you have assessed applications' risks and criticality, decide on an appropriate protection strategy. Do you need a 10-second RPO on that application, or would a 24-hour RPO suffice? A 10-second RPO solution costs more, while a 24-hour RPO costs less.

In some cases, a DR solution for a given application doesn’t make sense, and you can recover data through a backup/restore process. Adjust your resilience strategy based on a business risk assessment; saving money is just a by-product.

We are seeing many businesses migrating off the Broadcom VMware platform. Broadcom has extended some licensing terms and brought back the  vSphere Standard, which is giving businesses some time to make a decision, but at the same time, they seem to be removing key components such as VDDK that enable migration in the first place. The primary questions we get are about finding a migration tool and a place to migrate the workload to.