The Hypervisor Hunger Games – Service Provider Edition

Many MSPs (Managed service providers) have hedged their platform offering in and around the vSphere ecosystem and now what?

I have said before about the cost conundrum here and these are some decisions that people in all worlds will have to consider. But in a service provider world it’s maybe not a simple rip and replace with Nutanix AHV or another.

Service providers bring values by having this stack that they not only bring a relationship with their customers they also can automate and provide additional wrap around services and join up this vast ecosystem we have when it comes to VMware.

It’s also very much a price per fight here for MSPs. Value add + capabilities so spending the winnings on software licensing probably doesn’t add up. Maybe platform replacements like Nutanix AHV or even Red Hat OpenShift are not that much different licensing cost wise compared to the Broadcom tax. (Maybe it’s a valid tax being the best hypervisor but also the strongest ecosystem)

What I do think we could see is a lot of service providers looking into KVM based options. Albeit the ecosystem is maybe not as polished and supported it might just be enough to ramp up.

I am talking about options like Proxmox, XCP-NG and maybe even the new hypervisor option from HPE but this will come as a premium as well. These options will also not be free, they will be free like a puppy but the cost will come from elsewhere.

The other option could be KubeVirt. KubeVirt is what underpins Red Hat OpenShift Virtualisation but it is an open source project that can be used across many Kubernetes distributions and managed with a bit more effort to OpenShift. Could this be a real option for service providers to accelerate their own offerings into the cloud native ecosystem? An ecosystem that has been built over the last 10+ years.

I am going to share a fantastic resource for the vSphere admin here from my good friend Dean Lewis

I want to be clear that KubeVirt is even though established and been around a while it’s still missing that polish that we have within mainstream vSphere, Hyper-V, Nutanix AHV hypervisors and platforms but I remember when vSphere was like this and we all flocked in that direction.

All I do know is that wherever service providers land the requirement for data protection and management will be there so regardless.

I wrote about protecting these VMs on Kubernetes here

Finally, one thing is for sure. Virtual Machines are not going anywhere! We might be in a world surrounded by AI but the trusty virtualisation era isn’t over and will continue to be a staple be it in the data centre. Or…. In the public cloud…. Could the public cloud IaaS be an option instead of on premises for providers?