After Broadcom
Most of us are now familiar with the market realities of a post-“Broadcom-acquisition-of-VMware” world. Considering options – renewal, reduction or replacement – means primarily 1. How do I manage cost? 2. How do I maintain required functionality? It’s “keeping the lights on” (and managing the bill). But this is a boring topic. There are no doubts about the strengths of VMware’s portfolio, even if many of the top alternatives can do the core of what vSphere does. Solving the VMware problem in any organisation is just one thing – but what next?
This shake-up, which may involve signification migrations, upgrades, re-training and more, would be a missed opportunity for many if they choose simply to deal with their VMware bill & match functionality. It’s a chance to explore new technologies and claim new capabilities and resulting competitive advantages in their given markets. Consider one such option, offering an alternative: Red Hat’s OpenShift Virtualization.
Came for virtctl, stayed for oc/kubectl
OpenShift is Red Hat’s distribution of the container orchestration platform, Kubernetes (k8s). Using the KubeVirt project from the Kubernetes umbrella, OpenShift Virt allows users to deploy and manage qemu-KVM VMs alongside containers, with an array of functionality virtualization admins have come to expect.
However, for those who choose OpenShift, that is the starting line for innovation. Now they can apply k8s principles to VMs and containers alike, such as k8s-native CI/CD (VM pipelines, GitOps, VMs-as-code), self-healing capabilities and automated provisioning.
Market Context: Containers Are Mature, Kubernetes Is Growing
Moving to a platform which caters to VMs and containers means future-proofing in line with software trends. 61% of backend development is done in containers, stable for 4 years now, suggesting maturity of the technology. K8s itself continues to mature, still holding the largest and most consistent contributor base in the CNCF, and as the world increasingly focuses on AI/ML ambitions, k8s is poised to grow in meeting the requirements of AI/ML with its scalability, flexibility and efficient resource management.
According to the CNCF’s 2024 Annual Survey, k8s use in production was up 14% from 2023. Relevant to some highlighted features above, CI/CD use in production was up 36% and GitOps in “nearly all deployment practices” was up at 77% of respondents.
Additionally, “Cultural changes w/ dev team” and “Lack of training” were at 1st and 3rd on the list of challenges of container use in respondent organisations, and up at least 10% each. A takeaway here, albeit the writer’s interpretation, is that these are human change issues. The issue of what to do about VMware forces change for many orgs – what better moment than now to capitalise on a consensus of “we are going to have to change” and consider adopting a future-proofed platform.
Sources:
“CNCF Cloud Native 2024 [Survey]”
https://www.cncf.io/reports/cncf-annual-survey-2024/
“State of Cloud Native Development Q1 2025” CNCF
https://www.cncf.io/reports/state-of-cloud-native-development-q1-2025/
“Building VM images using Tekton and Secrets”
https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/building-vm-images-using-tekton-and-secrets
“Automate VM golden image management with OpenShift”
