Analysis: Storage vendors assist in the optimisation of VMware workloads

In recent months both NetApp and Pure Storage have introduced services to optimise VMware vSphere environments, hoping to reduce customer licence costs. What’s behind this apparent altruistic move and can we see a bigger picture with regards to the deployment of shared storage on-premises?

Background

At VMware Explore in Las Vegas, NetApp announced new features for Cloud Insights (now called Data Infrastructure Insights) to optimise VMware CPU and storage utilisation (initially known as Cloud Insights VMware Optimisation). The company hopes to enable its customers to reduce their VMware costs by between 25-50%. Some of the optimisations also include work on the next generation of vVols (which are essentially LUNs) and integrations with VASA (VMware’s APIs for Storage Awareness). There are also extended integrations with ONTAP, such as active-active data replication using SnapMirror.

At Accelerate in London in September 2024, Pure Storage announced similar VMware optimisation capabilities, with a new “VM Assessment” aimed at highlighting VMware vSphere utilisation and identifying possible savings. The Pure solution can find savings at both Host and VM level, offering cost optimisation strategies to customers.

Why are these storage vendors offering virtualisation optimisation solutions, and why now?

Acquisition

Let’s not forget that the acquisition of VMware by Broadcom is not even one year away from completion. Since November 2023, we’ve seen horror stories of substantial licence increases for vSphere, with a simplified portfolio that pushes customers to licence all the features of vSphere, even if they’re not required. VMware removed perpetual licenses and introduced two main products – VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF). The former combines vSphere, NSX and vSAN with platform management, while the latter incorporates Tanzu and other Aria management tools.

The scale of the price increases for customers is highlighted by the ongoing dispute between Broadcom and AT&T, which claims a 1050% increase in costs despite having contractual agreements in place with VMware prior to the acquisition. We have been told many stories of organisations reining in the scope of VMware upgrades as budget is swallowed up on just a fraction of the new infrastructure required.

Centralised Storage

Obviously, after splashing out $61 billion, Broadcom wants to see a return on the VMware investment it has made. As a result, the company is pushing for customers to use features like NSX and vSAN by bundling them in the limited SKUs available and, in parallel, increasing the licence cost. Broadcom can argue that the new bundling represents better value for money, and that may be true – if you want or need those additional features.

However, many customers choose to use centralised storage rather than vSAN, as it offers greater flexibility, including features like synchronous replication, support for multiple clusters, RDM, quality of service and arguably faster recovery for HA and fault tolerant virtual machines.

Using vSAN on a vSphere cluster introduces additional processor and memory overhead, resulting in some server resources being unavailable for virtual machines and possibly the need to deploy additional hardware and vSphere licences. This factor is the inherent issue with the HCI (hyper-converged) model of infrastructure design.

Choices

Faced with significant increases in licensing charges, if you are a VMware customer using centralised storage, do you consider fully exploiting the licenced features, such as vSAN and dropping centralised storage at your next refresh? Which component of your infrastructure is hardest (or easiest to remove)? Arguably, storage is easier to replace than the hypervisor, where there may be significant operational integrations and scripting in place.

Risk

There’s an obvious risk for on-premises storage vendors like NetApp and Pure Storage that could see a dip in sales attributed to customers moving to a VMware HCI model. It’s interesting that we haven’t seen any equivalent offering from Dell Technologies, possibly because the company has the option to sell customers either centralised storage or more servers with bundled storage as part of the VxRail platform.

It makes sense for NetApp and Pure Storage to assist customers in any way possible to remain on the shared storage model. Future additional steps could include direct support for alternative hypervisors (although this discounts Nutanix, which doesn’t support shared storage on AHV) and further vSphere integrations.

The Architect’s View®

The last 12 months have undoubtedly been a challenge for VMware customers. Faced with spiralling licensing charges, many will have considered either alternative platforms or other options to reduce costs. As we’ve seen in our research (see below for details on alternative solutions), moving away from VMware is challenging and introduces other costs, such as re-platforming applications and rebuilding automation and scripts.

When looking at total cost of ownership (TCO), the short-term view for many customers could be to move away from shared storage and use vSAN, despite some of the inherent deficiencies in the solution. This is a risk for Pure Storage and NetApp. If these two companies can tip the balance by highlighting efficiencies that keep customers on shared storage, then existing business is maintained.

There is one small additional aspect to consider. We were unofficially told by one of the two highlighted vendors that VMware’s own tools for optimisation highlight much fewer opportunities to save money compared to the storage vendor’s results. So, here is a suggestion; if you are a NetApp or Pure Storage customer, why not use their free optimisation tools to validate the data from the native VMware equivalents? You might just get a pleasant surprise and find more ways to save money.