As avoidable costs rise due to business decisions outside your control, use Delphix to break away from your VMware Hypervisor.
This article is original to the Delphix Community site and is the work of Sean Nothdurft and Michael Torok.
Whether you have always kept an eye on cost, or you have recently noticed a spike in costs associated with your Hypervisor selection, choice needs to be in your control. We recognize that Delphix itself is dependent on your having a Hypervisor solution and want to ensure you remain in control. It is no secret that VMware has seen significant pricing increases since the acquisition by Broadcom1,2,3. While many Delphix customers host our solutions on VMWare, several alternative Hypervisor options are supported, and migration tools are available.
Any migration of technologies comes with costs themselves. You need the time and resources to execute the migration. That said, you also need to understand the farther-reaching implications of the move. You need to test before you migrate. You need the ability to rollback and recover, should unexpected complications arise. You need to run in parallel for a brief time, to ensure you have everything you need in your new environment and avoid any late-appearing critical issues. Should they appear, you need to failback until you have solved any issues.
The Replication function of the Delphix Continuous Data Engine is purpose built with these functionalities in mind. Delphix Replication offers tested benefits, including:
- Limited downtime
- Incremental update before failover
- Failover testing
- Failback
- Forward-compatible replication, allowing you to take this opportunity to update to a newer version of the Engine
- Storage platform migration and right-sizing of your storage pool
- Platform agnostic (replicate from any hypervisor to any other hypervisor, or cloud)
Replication for Migration
Replication is a mature, robust, existing product feature which replicates infrastructure along with your data and object relationships to one or more target engines. It can be run on an incremental basis until a failover is desired. If you are replicating between Continuous Data Engines in an existing datacenter, network resource concerns tend to be minimal or can be worked around with a short-term dedicated network connection, as needed. Replication also allows network bandwidth limits to be set, further offering you control over these resources. Should you be moving between data centers or from on-premises to the cloud, firewall changes are minimal.
Installing on Your Selected Hypervisor
Installation of a Replication Target is no different than a typical deployment. The standard deployment process can be followed for your desired platform.
Replicating from Your Source Engine to Your Target Engine
When you select objects for replication, the engine will automatically include any dependencies. This means that replicating a VDB will automatically include its group, the parent dSource, and the group of the dSource, as well as any environments associated with those datasets. Self-service objects can also be selected for Replication.
Failover and Possible Failback
Starting with Continuous Data Engine version 14.0.0.0, a test-failover can be performed to validate that the failover works before committing to the new hypervisor. The failover operation can be undone by doing a failback operation.
Regain Your Freedom
With the ability to replicate your Engine and storage, you should never feel chained to a past decision. You are free to adopt any of the Hypervisors or cloud platforms supported as hosts for Delphix, and the Delphix Continuous Data Engine will streamline replication, test, and failback (as necessary). Embrace the freedom to break away.
Note: This same approach applies to customer scenarios where the desire is to consolidate from several to one Hypervisor.
1 This change has led to significant price increases for some customers, with anecdotal reports of increases ranging from 400% to 700%. (https://www.forrester.com/what-it-means/ep372-vmware-options/)
2 In its 2024 Predictions, Forrester stated that this year, 20% of VMware enterprise customers would start to move away from the platform, and Chabbra says that’s holding true so far. (https://www.forrester.com/what-it-means/ep372-vmware-options/)
3 KVM-based and Xen-based hypervisor alternatives, which are both open-source solutions, account for more than two-thirds (70%) of all respondents’ preferred choices. (https://www.techradar.com/pro/vmware-customers-are-jumping-ship-as-broadcom-sales-continue-heres-where-theyre-moving-to)
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