At $WORK, we use VMware - and the "hypervisor" part of it is honestly not even close the selling point for anyone doing serious enterprise workloads - and VMware knows this.

Smaller firms with a few VMs here and here could probably lift and shift into another platform super easily.

For the bigger firms with large on-prem investments is where the vendor lock-in is the most difficult. Take two parts of VMWare:

- NSX-T ([1]): The SDN and networking overlay component of VMware. It provides overlay networking and micro-segmentation (like your AWS VPCs, etc.), as well as service insertion for firewalls, etc. Pretty much nothing competes in this market for on-prem that's actually integrated with the hypervisor.

- vRA ([2]): Does all your infrastructure automation, monitoring, and optimization. Again, it's actually integrated with the hypervisor.

Not at all part of the hypervisor, but components that are part of virtualization infrastructure you just can't go without.

Now, I'm sure you could argue that there's other systems you could fit in here, or tooling that exists that solves these problems - won't argue with that. But the big part is integration - there's basically nothing that you can buy off the shelf that does all of this under one roof that doesn't become some cobbled mess of poorly-integrated tools.

Is VMware perfect? By no means. But at the end of the day, most companies want 1) something that works, and 2) someone to call if it breaks. Broadcom knows this - hence why they placed a bet that companies too deep into it couldn't shift off quickly enough - and I fear they've betted correctly.

The closest would maybe be OpenStack? Who knows where things will end up in the next few years!

[1] https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-NSX/index.html [2] https://docs.vmware.com/en/vRealize-Automation/index.html

user:	j_spencer
created:	July 12, 2020
karma:	3