Is HCI a True VMware Alternative?

As IT organizations evaluate their options for exiting VMware, many available options are hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) as a potential replacement. It makes sense. HCI proposes simplifying IT administrators’ lives by converging all of the various components of their infrastructure.

The problem is that HCI just packages virtualization, storage, and networking; it does not integrate them into a single code base. Instead, it recreates the legacy three-tier design, except in software. It ignores the fourth infrastructure tier, data resiliency and protection. As a result, the HCI approach introduces performance, scalability, compatibility, and data vulnerability challenges that must be considered before making the transition.

The Performance and Scalability Limitations of HCI

A key architectural challenge with HCI is that storage and networking are implemented as virtual machines (VMs) rather than core components of the infrastructure software. This approach creates several limitations:

• Performance bottlenecks: Since storage and networking services run as virtual machines (VMs), they compete for CPU and memory resources with production workloads, reducing efficiency.
• Latency: They must “wait” for their turn as the hypervisor processes requests from other VMs.
• Limited scalability: Due to tightly coupled infrastructure components, expanding storage or compute resources often requires adding unnecessary capacity in other areas and using almost identical server and storage hardware.
• Added complexity: The additional software layers required to implement the HCI solution often mean different interfaces for networking and storage.

These factors can make HCI less viable as a VMware alternative for organizations that require high performance and predictable scalability. While many companies will consider HCI during a server or storage refresh, they often quickly rule it out.

Strict Hardware Compatibility Requirements

Another major challenge with HCI is its strict hardware compatibility requirements. Many HCI vendors enforce rigid hardware compatibility lists (HCLs), which often mean:

• IT teams must purchase new servers and storage instead of leveraging their existing investments.
• The new hardware must often come from the HCI vendor, which leads to adding another vendor to what the IT staff needs to learn and support.
• Existing backup storage hardware may not be supported, forcing additional infrastructure purchases often from the same HCI vendor.
• The IT environment becomes locked into vendor-specific configurations, reducing flexibility over time.

These constraints may significantly increase costs for organizations looking to exit VMware without unnecessary hardware refreshes.

Costly Refreshes

Eventually, all server and storage hardware needs to be replaced. Server or storage refreshes are particularly challenging for HCI infrastructures. Most HCI designs require that the servers and storage in use be almost identical, coming from the same manufacturer and having similar performance characteristics. If during server or storage, mid-life, a new workload has a new set of compute or storage requirements, IT must often set up another HCI cluster just for that workload.

Finding a More Flexible VMware Exit Strategy

Fixing HCI

While HCI provides a “pre-packaged” approach to infrastructure, it does not offer an integrated approach. Its performance overhead, scalability limits, and hardware constraints present challenges that IT teams must carefully evaluate. The lack of integration also leads to slow VMware migration times and complexity in operations.

VMware alternatives like VergeIO’s ultraconverged infrastructure (UCI) provide a different architectural approach that integrates storage and networking directly into the hypervisor rather than running them as separate VMs. Because storage and networking are no longer second-class citizens to the hypervisor, its VergeOS software eliminates many of HCI’s inefficiencies and improves performance.

VergeIO integrates VMware migration directly into the VergeOS code. IT administrators point their VergeOS environment at VMware, select the VMs they want to import, and migrate the entire VM instance, including networking configurations. Transfer to the VergeOS environment is fast and seamless.

Integrated Data Protection

Backup storage compatibility is another key factor in a VMware exit strategy. Storware Backup and Recovery reduces backup software costs while helping organizations maintain their backup infrastructure. This approach prevents the need to purchase new backup appliances, while ensuring long-term data protection. Storware Backup and Recovery supports appliances from Rubrik, Data Domain, and HPE, as well as cloud-based object stores.

Storware Backup and Recovery integrates directly into VergeOS, utilizes snapshots, and employs changed block tracking technology to provide fast, reliable backups. By combining VergeOS’s snapshots and replication with Storware Backup and Recovery capabilities, IT can create the ultimate in data protection and infrastructure, enabling customers to exit VMWare while maintaining the use of their existing hardware.

Mix Nodes, Extend Useful Hardware Life

VergeOS abstracts itself from hardware using artificial intelligence. Rather than tailoring the software to specific hardware, it employs AI to understand the hardware’s capabilities and efficiently allocate workloads to the appropriate resources.

The abstraction facilitates the integration of vastly different types of server nodes. Under VergeOS, if a new workload arises during the infrastructure’s mid-life, IT can add several servers tailored to that workload’s requirements to the existing instance. Any surplus resources on those servers can also be allocated to the original workloads. This AI enables IT teams to extend the lifespan of their existing hardware while keeping up with evolving IT demands.

As these servers age, the likelihood of failure increases. A key responsibility of a mixed node infrastructure is to ensure that as servers grow more susceptible to failure due to aging, access to data and applications remains uninterrupted. VergeOS safeguards against data availability challenges arising from drive failure, and its ioGuardian feature surpasses “instant recovery” products, delivering real-time recovery from multiple simultaneous failures without any data loss or restoration delays.

The multi-layered protection capabilities of VergeOS and Storware help many customers avoid overpriced “out-of-warranty” maintenance on their server hardware. Instead, they quite literally run their servers until they fail permanently, in some cases ten years after purchase.

Conclusion

For organizations evaluating their VMware exit strategy, selecting an infrastructure solution that provides performance, scalability, and hardware flexibility is critical. VergeIO and Storware offer an approach that allows IT teams to modernize their environments without unnecessary hardware refreshes or performance trade-offs.