It’s been a marathon, but here we are, on the precipice of pulling the trigger on this virtual machine migration, with only one question remaining: should we?
Considerations Before Migrations
In situations like these, it’s easy to be filled with rage and want nothing more than to punish the offending company. However, unless you’re a Fortune 500 company, Broadcom won’t even bat an eye at your rage quit – so it’s important to keep your eye on the ball: are you making the right decision for your company? This is where the answers to the previous six questions come together to guide you towards the “right” decision.
Financial Analysis
Let’s use some simplified numbers to think this through:
Imagine our current VMware renewal costs have jumped from $25,000 to $100,000 (which sadly isn’t unrealistic).
Now, consider a new hypervisor vendor who is offering a cheaper solution at $20,000 per year, significantly less than VMware, but only if you sign a five-year upfront commitment… but that’s $100,000 now.
Let’s assume that it works with our existing backup and other ecosystem tools.
However, we don’t have enough compute power to setup the new nodes while our old ones are working. This means we have to buy some new servers, so we decide on a three-node cluster for testing, costing $115,000 over five years for hardware, support, necessary Microsoft licensing (which we have to do, because we’re running stuff on both environments at the same time), and three years of Software Assurance.
Then we realize we have to expand the SAN to have enough capacity to store two copies of all of our servers. Let’s conservatively say that’s another $45,000.
Then our backup server also needs more capacity to be able to store old and new backups for requisite timeframes, that’s another $15,000.
So now we’re spending $100k + $115k + $45k + $15k = $275k upfront. That’s basically a three-year breakeven with staying on VMware, which means starting year four we’re saving money… assuming we don’t think about labor costs.
Labor Time and Investment
Depending on your environment’s complexity and size, a project like this could easily take half of an IT person’s time for a year (conservatively) to get everything researched, setup, moved, tested, trained, and working as well as it was before.
Assuming the US average infrastructure admin salary of $89,000 + 20% benefits, using half a year on this project is now costing an extra $53,000 in time, bringing us to $328,000. We still break even in year four – as long as we don’t have to renew VMware before we finish.
Strategic Decision Making
Now, the real question comes: is it more beneficial for the business to delay or cancel other projects to focus on migrating away from VMware and saving on renewal costs? Or is it better to absorb the renewal cost and prioritize other critical initiatives like ERP migration, EMR implementation, or new Wi-Fi and IoT projects? Only your business can answer that.
Long-Term Considerations
A major factor in the long-term view is the uncertainty surrounding vendor actions. Six months from now, VMware may get so much backlash that they back down from their insane price gouging and instead only raise it 50% – or they could hike it even more.
At that point, the above ROI calculations change dramatically, either extending or shortening the breakeven period. Is THAT a good investment? What if your chosen replacement hypervisor realizes that they can double THEIR rates and still be cheaper than VMware? What does that do to your math?
To summarize this entire 4600-word Odyssey, a migration away from VMware isn’t a trivial matter. This is the major infrastructure component for most IT organizations, and controls all of your core business processes. Even if you find your perfect solution, you still have opportunity costs involved with migrating. Think through everything involved and make a BUSINESS decision, rather than an IT decision – or a rage-based decision.
If the idea of all of this is overwhelming and you need help, feel free to reach out. We’re here to help.
If you’d like more information about how to decide if you should migrate from VMware, please contact us by calling us at (502) 240-0404 or emailing info@mirazon.com