The ongoing legal dispute between supermarket chain Tesco and Broadcom/VMware illustrates the challenges IT departments are likely to face if they plan to migrate to an alternative hypervisor.
The contract dispute with VMware has led Tesco to take the decision to replace its entire virtual server estate with an alternative hypervisor by 2027. In its filing, Tesco said the timeframe of the migration has created operational and commercial risk, as well as resulting in “material cost and disruption to the business”.
Tesco said it has incurred additional costs as it needed to develop or buy functionality and support interoperability that was only available on VMware. In particular, Tesco said the Veeam backup and Zerto’s data security products it uses are not currently interoperable with any other server virtualisation platforms.
Following completion of its acquisition of VMware in November 2023, Broadcom consolidated VMware products into product bundles such as VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and rolled out subscription-based pricing.
Some VMware customers, like Tesco, have been negatively impacted by these changes, which has not only seen them having to buy VMware products they do not use because they are included in the product bundle, but they have also seen a price hike due to licensing costs of the VMware product bundle.
Tesco’s claim concerns a five-year contract it originally signed in 2021 for VMware and VMware support. Broadcom refused to fulfil the contract, claiming the products the supermarket chain had purchased under its original agreement were no longer available.
While it is unclear from the legal filings which hypervisor platforms Tesco has selected, what is clear is that the product is not a like-for-like replacement, and the retailer is having to do remedial work to get it working.
The AHV alternative to VMware
Nutanix is among the companies that have seen an uptick in interest following the changes made to VMware following the Broadcom acquisition. The company, which established itself as a hyperconverged IT infrastructure provider alternative offering a lower cost and simplified alternative to PC servers, has spent the past few years upselling the benefit of its VMware alternative, its Acropolis hypervisor (AHV), based on KVM open source virtualisation software.
When asked about how much progress has been made certifying third-party products with AHV, Rajiv Ramaswami, chief executive officer of Nutanix, said: “We probably have something close to 1,500 appliances and other products that are certified today, such as the Cisco Unified Communications appliance.”
With regards to backup, which is an area Tesco found challenging due to these products often relying on VMware application programming interfaces (APIs) for deep integration with the hypervisor, Ramaswami claimed that Veeam, Rubrik and other backup software providers are all certified work with Nutanix, as are firewalls from the likes of Palo Alto, Fortinet and Checkpoint. “We have been working with them for many years,” he said, adding that over the past 10 years, Nutanix has built out a technology ecosystem around its KVM-based hypervisor.
He said that while Veeam has had “basic integration” with AHV for a long time, the integration was behind VMware’s, which was much more established. However, he added: “When you talk to Veeam today, it’s a very different thing. They say their integration with Nutanix is on par with VMware integration. I was with the Veeam CEO a couple of weeks ago and we’ve been building the ecosystem over time.”
While the Tesco legal filing shows the company expects interoperability issues will eventually be resolved as software providers expand the level of integration they provide with non-VMware platforms, it is clear that this is a work in progress.
Some products, like Veeam, provide plug-ins to enable deep integration. But the reality is that there will inevitably be choices and compromises software providers will make when deciding which of their products are certified for a given hypervisor and the level of integration they are prepared to provide. These decisions have a material impact on the ease of deployment and performance of VMware virtualisation migrations.
