Why Gartner is wrong. VMware migrations are achievable, and they don’t take years.

While I don’t generally engage heavily on the LinkedIn front, I’ve had many leaders who we’ve helped over the years ask me to comment on Gartner’s recent article and its findings, mostly because they don’t agree.

These leaders cite the migration we performed for them – either moving their infrastructure into our cloud or transitioning from VMware to our VergeIO platform. Every single one of our customers has reaped the benefits of being VMware-free long before the price hikes.

To be blunt, we complete these moves in weeks, the biggest projects in months, but never years.

Let’s break down the key factors for a successful VMware migration. Many of these apply to any major migration, but they become even more critical when dealing with a cornerstone technology like VMware.

I’d wager there are a bunch of MSPs and CSPs that might find these views a breath of fresh air to what the technology vendors are preaching.

Leadership: Steer the Ship with a Clear Strategy

The industry has spent the better part of a decade telling IT leaders to be more focused on the business, many have even put business leaders in charge of IT. The irony of this is that we are now confronted with an incredibly technical project.

For many organizations, VMware is a multi-domain/multi-discipline homologation of tools, services, and platforms that make the whole business go round.  It involves hardware, VMs, servers, networking, storage solutions, security solutions, most likely all growing organically with the business. 

While VMware at its core has helped abstract most technologists from these layers of infrastructure, this project, at its core, is a nuts-and-bolts problem.  In other words, you will have to get dirty or at a minimum, recognize that others are getting extremely dirty.  Even if you are not truly involved, you need to recognize the implications and rally the business and your team around this reality. 

Key leadership takeaways

1. Lead with empathy. The fact of the matter is this project is due to outside influences.  No one asked for this migration. But here we are. The team needs to hear: “We’re in this together.”

2. Build conviction that pushes a path to vindication.  Make it real, make it personal.  Many IT professionals are still in disbelief and dismay – even a year after this news broke and the writing was on the wall.

But here we are, and Broadcom wants more money. Not just from the business, cutting into your margins, (a great driver for those outside of IT) but most likely straight from the existing IT budget. 

Maybe the staff won’t get raises this year because of this?  Maybe they won’t get bonuses?  As the bean counters always like to point out “the money has to come from somewhere”. 

With a 6x+ cost increase, Broadcom isn’t just raising prices – they’re stealing your lunch money.

So, what are you going to do about it? Hopefully, your team and business will rally to fight back.

3. Define objectives beyond ‘leaving VMware.’  That isn’t the goal.  The goal is to reduce the cost of the services you are currently getting from VMware. This isn’t an all-or-nothing move – it’s about incremental wins. The more you reduce reliance on VMware, the more you cut costs without disrupting operations.

4. Understand how you are billed. Depending on how you buy VMware, you most likely don’t pay directly for what you use.  You’re buying a bundle, or you’re being billed based on CPU cores and GBs of RAM.

What VMware services are you actually using?

If you aren’t using it, can you turn it off and reduce your CPU cores and RAM GBs assessed fees?  Can you temporarily move to a lower-tier license?

Maybe the team really likes a certain VMware tool – If it’s only billed on RAM usage, keep it – but migrate everything else.

Don’t overlook VMware’s hidden cost.

VMware has the highest administrative footprint of any hypervisor.  In bigger, more complex, more full featured VMware environments, you spend almost as much money to run VMware’s overhead as you do the actual workload. 

And if you own perpetual licenses? Nothing stops working when your contract ends. Ask yourself: Do your dev servers really need VMware support?

5. Think Bigger: Audacious Plans = Faster Migrations

For many businesses, the 6x cost increase clock starts ticking soon. That cost will hit – month after month.

Use this to build leverage with leadership.

• Show the worst-case cost scenario. It will build more leverage to allow more flexibility from the business than just “this is an IT problem”. 
• Use news headlines to reinforce the urgency. Show them the multitudes of headlines around the cost increases to back your story. 
• Weigh uptime vs. cost reality. There’s a balance between the amount of effort to keep something online vs the cost of the downtime.  This might buy you more allowable downtime and spare you countless cycles trying to keep that one creaky service online while doing tons of backflips and insane off-hours changes, and your IT team will thank you – back to that empathy point.
• Prioritization: We’ve talked about not buying support for dev servers now that they’re not incurring costs…  What if you focus all your attention on moving Production first? Everyone knows that’s the priority, and everyone will be hellbent on not screwing it up. And let’s be honest, a bunch of production is different from non-prod anyway, so be rested, be sharp, and focus on where it matters: the infrastructure that makes the business money and probably costs the most to keep on VMware.

People: Rally the Right Team

This ties closely to the empathy factor, but let’s be real – not everyone will be on board.

Some will rally behind the mission. Others? They’ll resist, hesitate, or actively push against it.

You need to make this migration a collective success, not just a side project for a handful of people. As many others have said, consider building a tiger team to attack this, but don’t let it run in a silo.  Make the outcome a part of everyone’s success.  Points to consider:

1. Your budget isn’t built for this – so get strategic. Most IT budgets are locked into a “maintenance only” mode.

• Did you budget for a whole new solution?
• Did you budget for more manpower?
• If not, how will the business justify the 6x cost increase?

Find the middle ground. The money is either going to Broadcom’s bottom line-or into your team’s ability to execute the transition.

2. Flip the narrative – Incentivize Migration Success.  

• Just like you can save money incrementally, tie bonuses to migration success.
• Motivation matters. Include free meals and Red Bull. Are comp days for all the weekend work an option?  
• Make it clear, this one-time pain will lead to the business avoiding the cost increase indefinitely.

3. Avoid the “Wait It Out” Mindset – Bring in the Right Experts. The biggest migration killer? Complacency.

Because this project is being billed as complex and painful, many IT pros instinctively choose to wait it out. Some will even throw FUD into the mix – pushing worst-case scenarios, delays, and doubt.

And here’s where Gartner actually gets something right:

“VMware is a networking vendor first, a storage supplier second, a management tools provider third – and only then a source of virtualization technology.”

Translation? This isn’t just a “server guy” problem.

• Don’t put only the infrastructure team in charge. That’s selling this project short.
• Don’t put a PM in charge with no technical depth – they’ll generate blockers, not solutions.
• If your team is too siloed, you need a mediator, a peace broker, or even a translator to bridge the gaps.

Outside experts aren’t just about new technology – they bring fresh perspective and experience.

• They help break silos and accelerate planning.
• They bolster team morale by keeping momentum high.
• If you need a Discovery on your environment, now’s the time.

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4. Think outside the box and leverage discovery and automation. Keep in mind the technology that was transformative with VMware five years ago is old hat today. Use the automation to your advantage. 

You most likely have a lot of rich information about your environment and more confidence in how it is configured. 

A lot of that automation is directly transferrable into different hypervisors.  This quickly removes the resistance wall of “this will take forever” because everyone has some sort of endpoint/automation technology now. 

(The outside experts can help provide experience on how they’ve leveraged these solutions before to accelerate the migration.)

Technology: Keep it Practical, Not Paralysis

There’s a reason this is last on the list.  Gartner claims a VMware migration requires:

• 7–10 full-time staff for a month just for scoping.
• Another six people for up to nine months evaluating replacements.

I completely disagree. That’s not planning. That’s analysis paralysis. Gartner has taken the approach of identifying the best solution to an extreme. Ironically, none of what they are examining is even what makes the project a success or failure. 

Judge your new solution using three key criteria:

Define success & benchmark it ruthlessly

1.Know your workload – inside and out.

• What’s your biggest constraint? CPU usage? RAM? Disk IO? Packets per second?
• What are your non-negotiable performance requirements? What “nuts and bolts” items are the priority for the platform?  Not the bells and whistles, the nuts and bolts.  What does it have to accomplish from a performance perspective. 
• Benchmark your current environment – then demand vendors prove they can match or exceed it.

If they can’t? They’re not a viable option. If they can’t hack it and offer zero help proving they can meet the requirements on your workload/benchmark then look for a technology partner that will work with you. This is a big project, if the technology platform and support team can’t put in the hours now, they won’t after you’ve signed. Remove all the sales manoeuvring and stick to success criteria by the technical numbers. 

2. Prioritize Agility.

If the last five years have taught us anything, it’s that drastic change is constant!  So, get used to it and make sure your team does too.

A lot of time is wasted getting from 95% confidence to 100%. You don’t know what you don’t know.  So, wasting months refining the lowest cost, the most streamlined solution will probably come back to bite you the moment the business needs a shift. 

You don’t build a house with just a hammer. You need a whole toolbox. Prioritize solutions that provide more flexibility to help you deal with the unknown.  Unknown in both what the future holds and what you don’t know about your environment and the technology and apps you will be re-platforming.

3. Ditch Single-Vendor Lock-In

A single solution doesn’t exist for all of this.  If you use most or all of the VMware portfolio, that’s partially why you’re in this mess, because you picked a single vendor solution.  Don’t put all your eggs in one basket again! 

There is also strong recommendation to keep your monitoring and tooling open source.  It allows you to maneuver when you need to change out (just) your hypervisor, instead of your hypervisor, storage, network, security, monitoring, and logging tools. 

Give the team the freedom to find the solutions they need that meet the criteria, benchmark successfully, and have strong feedback from the operations team. 

4. Involve Your Team in the Decision – Not Sales Reps

Don’t fall victim to sales guys or your favorite architect, he’s also easy prey for a sales guy.  This migration isn’t about vendor schmoozing.

Instead of taking 15 lunches and dinners, ask your team. Find out what truly matters to them and which product they tangibly like better.  Because at the end of the day all the fancy capabilities in the world don’t matter if your IT team hates using it.

Brush aside the bells and whistles; what works best on each platform you’re evaluating?  Which one are they more confident working with?  If you want true buy-in to get the project done, they need to be a part of the decision.  Help them with this evaluation by noting the top four to five things they do on the platform day-to-day. 

Examples include:

• How easy is it to put a node into maintenance?
• How granular are the access controls for our different technician levels?
• How intuitive is the snapshot engine?
• How easy is it to login?

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We were able to rate VergeIO high because the UI is fast. It is 8-10x faster than VMware. This makes using it immensely more enjoyable. The techs can move at their speed, not at VMware’s speed.  The VergeIO UI was also very similar to VMware, meaning the training time was minimal. Hopping from VMware to OpenStack?  Not so much…

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While the project team and architects will be focused on all the capabilities, those only matter once.  How you use the system day-to-day is something you must live with forever and makes the difference during the migrations and follow-on support.

Hopefully you found some useful insights here that will arm you with better strategies to navigate your VMware exit with confidence.

It takes discipline to stay focused – but the clock is ticking. You need to be realistic about your team, your business, and the challenges ahead.

Looking at this through your own leadership lens – the skills of your team, plus the consensus you can build within the business – will allow for a successful project in a reasonable timeframe. 

If you need assistance in any of these areas, CenterGrid is ready to help. We’re known for making the impossible happen in ridiculously short timelines. We’ve stared down the worst and delivered the best.