Modernizing Virtualization and Hypervisor Strategy
With recent changes in the virtualization marketplace, organizations are looking for solutions that meet their needs.
- FOUR VIRTUALIZATION PATH OPTIONS
- CONTAINERIZATION AND PLATFORM ENGINEERING
- VIRTUALIZATION MODERNIZATION SUPPORT
There’s no one best way forward for organizations seeking to optimize their virtualization environments. But broadly, teams will land on one of the following four approaches. The right path will depend on an organization’s business goals, existing investments, IT team skills and timeline.
STAY THE COURSE: For organizations with longstanding VMware investments, staying the course with the vendor may be the most practical and cost-effective option, especially in the short term. Many teams are already trained on VMware, with mission-critical processes such as disaster recovery and compliance monitoring closely linked to their VMware stack. Further, familiar and proven tools such as vSphere and vMotion continue to deliver the reliability and performance demanded of enterprise IT infrastructure.
Newer tools such as VCF and Live Recovery provide additional value, and VMware Aria Suite is a much more powerful management platform than the vCenter dashboard that IT teams have been using for years. For some organizations, renewing an existing VMware agreement may be more economical than migrating, especially when factoring in retraining, replatforming and the risk of potential downtime.
MIGRATE TO A NEW PLATFORM: For organizations looking for greater flexibility or lower costs, migrating to a new hypervisor platform may be the right move. Options such as Microsoft Azure Local, Nutanix AHV and Red Hat OpenStack all offer strong performance and robust feature sets, with licensing models that some organizations may find more economical.
While the prospect of switching virtualization platforms is often daunting, the transition can be relatively straightforward with the right combination of planning, partners and tools. Many organizations take a phased migration approach, starting with development and test environments to reduce risk and build momentum before moving onto their production environments. Sometimes, teams run both platforms side by side during the transition to minimize the chances of disruption.
TAKE A HYBRID APPROACH: By adopting a multihypervisor or hybrid cloud strategy, organizations can continue using their VMware infrastructure for some portion of their workloads while running the rest on other infrastructure or in public cloud environments. This approach is a good fit for organizations that want to keep their mission-critical applications running in the familiar environment of VMware but also want to take advantage of the cost efficiency and flexibility offered by other options for less critical workloads.
For organizations taking a hybrid approach, Azure Local may make sense to support Microsoft tools and licensing bundles, while Nutanix AHV is attractive to teams seeking the simplified management capabilities of hyperconverged infrastructure.
MODERNIZE AND OPTIMIZE: There may be opportunities for organizations to revamp their IT environments to better take advantage of VMware’s new licensing structure. Many organizations have allowed their data center hardware to sprawl over time, simply purchasing new physical hosts whenever a new need arises. With VMware’s licensing costs now tied to physical CPU cores, this sort of hardware scale-out can quickly drive up costs.
By investing in modern, high-end hardware solutions, organizations may be able to optimize their VMware utilization and bring down their bills. Also, VMware’s bundled offerings may help teams make more economical use of some of their other IT investments. For instance, teams can use the vRealize Log Insight tool included with VCF to filter logs before sending them to external monitoring tools, helping to reduce costs for solutions that bill based on data volume.
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Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
Downtime due to causes such as cyberattacks and natural disasters represent a major threat to business operations, with a single hour of downtime costing at least $300,000 for 90% of organizations. Modern virtualization software can provide organizations an opportunity to enhance their business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities.
CYBER RESILIENCE: Virtualization enables IT teams to isolate systems through measures such as network segmentation and virtual backups. This helps organizations recover quickly from disruptions and get back to business.
GROUND-TO-CLOUD DATA REPLICATION: Virtualized systems allow IT teams move data efficiently between on-premises environments and the cloud. The replication of virtual machines VMs in the cloud provides organizations with a flexible way to restore operations that have been disrupted.
AUTOMATION IN TESTING: Dependencies on external systems or services can hamper software testing by affecting the availability and accessibility of dependent systems. However, virtualization minimizes these dependencies, enabling efficient and thorough testing.
Organizations can get more value from their virtualization environments by embracing modern approaches to application development and hosting. Initiatives such as application modernization, containerization and platform engineering help IT teams deliver faster, more frequent updates to business-critical tools. These strategies can also lay the foundation for hybrid cloud, multicloud and cloud-native architectures, which give organizations increased flexibility in where and how they host their most critical workloads.
APPLICATION MODERNIZATION: Many organizations rely on outdated legacy software for core business processes. Rather than replace these applications entirely, IT and business leaders often opt for application modernization, a process that improves software performance and portability within virtualized or containerized environments. Often, legacy applications are burdened by years of technical debt, and IT teams may spend a great deal of time and effort simply maintaining them, taking their focus away from more strategic projects that add value to the business.
A typical application modernization process involves breaking up monolithic applications into more modular and scalable microservices. This can improve IT teams’ ability to deploy updates, isolate issues and scale individual services independently. Modernization also provides a natural fit for DevOps workflows, which allow development teams to build and ship new features faster than traditional development methods allow. Additionally, modernized applications are typically much more cloud-friendly, giving organizations additional hosting options for software programs that previously needed to run in very specific environments. Application modernization efforts often lead organizations to adopt containerization.
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CONTAINERIZATION: Containerization is an approach that bundles an application’s code, files and libraries into a single package (or “container”) that can run on any infrastructure. This concept is similar to, but distinct from, virtualization. Rather than mimicking the hardware layer, containerization removes the operating system layer from the self-contained environment, allowing the application to run independently from the host operating system. This reduces vendor lock-in and makes workloads more portable. It also improves resource efficiency and enables faster application deployments and rollbacks.
Containerization is especially well-suited to microservices-based architectures and DevOps workflows, where rapid iteration and scalability are essential. The practice also promotes consistency across development, test and production environments, which can reduce errors and improve reliability. Tools such as Kubernetes provide orchestration for container environments, making it easier to manage application containers at scale across hybrid and multicloud ecosystems. Kubernetes also allows IT organizations to run VMs in their container infrastructures and manage their virtualization environments in a unified manner with their container and artificial intelligence (AI) workloads. As container adoption continues to grow across industries, this approach is helping organizations increase agility, accelerate time to market and future proof their application environments.
PLATFORM ENGINEERING: Platform engineering is the practice of building and maintaining internal platforms that provide users with self-service tools for deploying and managing applications. While application modernization and containerization focus on what is being built and how it runs, platform engineering focuses on how these applications are delivered and operated at scale. The practice, which supports both virtualization and containerization, applies DevOps principles to streamline deployment, enforce standards and reduce operational overhead.
Many organizations turn to third-party platform engineers to help manage their new automated environments. For instance, an organization may rely on CDW’s platform engineering services to help it create an internal developer platform that seamlessly allows for continuous integration of new tools and services without compromising performance. An IDP can help organizations enforce standards, improve scalability and speed up time-to-market by incorporating reusable automation components such as libraries, templates and other predefined resources. As organizations mature their platform engineering operations, many are incorporating AI to accelerate development, improve security and streamline processes.
Many organizations find that they need a trusted partner to help them navigate shifts in the virtualization landscape. CDW’s solution architects have the industry-leading partnerships and years of deep cross-segment experience needed to help leaders build a virtualization environment tailored to their unique needs.
VIRTUALIZATION STRATEGY: By embracing virtualization, organizations can streamline, scale and secure their IT environments. CDW’s experts offer vendor-agnostic advice to help leaders determine which virtualization infrastructure will best meet their current needs and set them up for future success. CDW works closely with both IT and business stakeholders to align virtualization strategy with organizational goals, budget constraints and long-term digital transformation initiatives.
PLATFORM ENGINEERING WORKSHOPS: CDW engagements such as Platform Engineering Foundation Workshops, Infrastructure as Code Workshops, DevSecOps Workshops and hands-on Immersion Days can kick-start organizations’ platform engineering initiatives. By enabling developers with a centralized platform, platform engineering helps teams reduce costs, improve security, and simplify workflows and dependencies through automation and governance.
APPLICATION MODERNIZATION ROADMAPPING: Legacy applications can create both a major performance bottleneck for IT environments and a significant management burden for data center teams. CDW’s proprietary tools and services can detect migration complexity, analyze application age and establish a secure modernization strategy. Offerings include a Strategic Application Modernization Assessment (SAMA), Integration Modernization Workshops and mainframe modernization services. Additionally, CDW’s cloud-native services can help organizations achieve faster development and deployment, as well as cost savings.
CONTAINERIZATION WORKSHOPS: In addition to providing support for virtualization with app modernization, CDW offers both a container-first approach with VM support or complete containerization. CDW’s experts can guide teams through this critical decision-making process, digging into important questions: Are your applications suited for containerization? Are your teams equipped to manage both VMs and containerized applications? How do you plan to address skills gaps within your teams?
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MIGRATION SUPPORT: The migration process from a legacy virtualization environment to a new solution can be a significant source of stress for both IT teams and business leaders, and this tension is sometimes the source of inaction. CDW can guide organizations through every step of the migration process, from planning and testing to execution and optimization. While most internal teams have limited experience with large-scale migrations, CDW’s experts are seasoned in this work and know how to avoid common pitfalls that can disrupt business operations.
AI READINESS ASSESSMENTS: As organizations re-evaluate their virtualization environments, they must not only ensure that their technology investments will meet their present needs, but also that any new infrastructure is flexible and scalable enough to adapt to future developments. CDW’s experts can analyze existing and planned IT environments to ensure they are ready for emerging AI applications.
HYBRID CLOUD SERVICES: Many organizations’ virtualized compute environments are part of a larger hybrid cloud strategy that leverages the agility and scale of public cloud hyperscalers. CDW offers a wide range of cloud solutions and services, including cloud migration services, hybrid cloud services and multicloud services. CDW’s comprehensive Cloud Lifecycle Services cover migration, talent orchestration, managed application services and on-demand engineering services.
TRAINING AND ADOPTION: CDW offers tailored training programs to help IT teams build the skills needed to operate modern virtualization, container and platform environments with confidence. With foundational workshops and advanced certifications, CDW equips teams with practical knowledge in areas such as DevOps, Kubernetes and cloud-native tools, ensuring that modernization efforts are not only successful at launch but fully adopted and sustainable over time.
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Andrew Young
Hybrid Infrastructure Strategy Lead
Roger Haney
Chief Architect for Software-Defined Infrastructure, CDW