In this blog, you’ll learn how you can gradually reduce your virtual environment licence costs using a range of solutions available from various vendors like VMware, Microsoft Hyper V and HPE VM Essentials.
A lot has changed in a short space of time in the world of virtualisation—licence programmes have changed and prices have soared—something that no one had budgeted for, causing chaos with many companies considered changing providers. But switching was easier said than done. What options are there, which solution is the best for your situation, and what are the costs?
Bechtle can help you make the right choice. As a vendor partner, we know all the options and can objectively advise you without tying you to one vendor. For example, we can strategically advise you on developing your new virtualisation strategy, guide you through a migration, advise you on using your new environment, and help you decide which workloads belong on which VM—all with a focus on your specific needs. On this basis, we will look at what (combination of) hypervisors from which vendor are the best for you.
Three steps to optimisation and cost savings
Optimising a virtual environments is generally a custom process, but where do you begin? Luckily, a generic roadmap can be created to get you started with measures that apply to every organisation. Migrating is often the best solution, but it takes a lot of time and effort. Do the upfront savings outweigh the risks of a weaker infrastructure? A phased transition is the best option, allowing you to minimise risks and optimise your virtual environment. On the basis of our experience, we’ve drawn up a list of steps for a structured migration.
Step 1 – Take an inventory
The first logical step is a stock take of your virtual environment to get an insight into unused, redundant licences and we can guide you through the virtualisation scan. You’ll also find out where virtual workloads are running and how you can move them. This allows you to reduce existing licences to the bare essentials while optimising your virtual server environment and associated costs.
Step 2 – Partial transition
Looking to minimise uncertainty and risks? Start with migrating non-critical environments to another hypervisor like HPE VM Essentials, for testing and development. While you’ll have two different environments for a time, but HPE has a solution for that—an interface that allows you to manage various virtual workloads from different vendors. This will give you a single management environment for all of your VMs from all vendors.
Step 3 – Full transition
Thanks to a single management environment for all stacks, you can gradually migrate the remaining critical workloads to your new hypervisor. You can do this entirely at your own pace, deciding which VMs have priority, do you remain in full control.
HPE VM Essentials
In response to the significant changes in the virtualisation landscape, HPE has acquired Morpheus Data, a specialist in virtualisation, and now offers the promising HPE VM Essentials solution, allowing it to provide a scalable KVM virtualisation stack. HPE VM Essentials operates on a subscription license model basis, with no additional costs for connecting existing clusters. It is offered as a socket licence, meaning the software price remains consistent regardless of whether your processor has 16 cores or 128 cores, leading to substantial cost savings. The software continually evolves, with new features being added without any upgrade fees. Moreover, HPE VM Essentials simplifies VM management and supports common storage protocols, distributed workloads, high availability, live migrations, and integrated data protection.
Morpheus Data is renowned for its extensive integration capabilities with third-party technologies, and HPE VM Essentials leverages the same plug-in framework to integrate partner ecosystems. Various partners and applications have already announced support for HPE VM Essentials and Commvault and Cohesity are the first to offer backup support for VMs on the HPE VM Essentials platform. HPE/Morpheus and Veeam are also working diligently to support this package for backups—a significant advancement, as Veeam is the most widely used backup program.
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