Open Source Disrupts Again: Navigating the Future of Virtualization Post-VMWare

The virtualization landscape is undergoing a seismic shift. With Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware triggering uncertainty around licensing, pricing, and long-term strategy, organizations worldwide are re-evaluating their infrastructure choices. Some have opted to extend their VMware contracts, delaying the decision, while others are actively exploring alternative solutions that offer greater flexibility, cost-effectiveness, and long-term viability.

But moving away from VMware isn’t just a technology shift—it’s a strategic transformation that requires a deep understanding of the market landscape, regional differences, economic considerations, and operational challenges. Where should enterprises start? What are the real costs, risks, and benefits of migrating to an open-source alternative like OpenStack?

In this exclusive fireside chat, Jimmy McArthur, Director of Business Development at OpenInfra Foundation, and Todd Robinson, Co-Founder of OpenMetal, will discuss the current and future state of VMware migrations, breaking down:

• The 2024 Migration Landscape: What happened in the past year? Why are some companies still evaluating options while others are actively moving?
• Trends for 2025 and Beyond: What patterns are emerging? Are companies postponing the decision only to face bigger challenges down the road?
• The Role of OpenInfra Foundation: How is the VMware Migration Working Group helping companies navigate OpenStack adoption? What resources exist for organizations considering this transition?
• Regional Perspectives: North America’s approach to open-source adoption, Europe’s focus on digital sovereignty, and how Asia is adapting to open infrastructure.
• Avoiding Vendor Lock-In: Why the shift away from VMware is about more than just cost—it’s about regaining control over infrastructure choices.
• OpenMetal’s Role in the Transition: How OpenMetal enables rapid OpenStack deployments and helps enterprises reduce the complexity of migration while attaining cost and operational efficiencies.

Beyond the technical and strategic aspects, this conversation will also address the economic realities of VMware migration. Recent industry reports suggest that migrating could cost organizations as much as $5,000 per VM—but is that the whole story? Jimmy and Todd will break down the financial impact, from initial investment to long-term savings and operational efficiencies.

Additionally, the chat will explore how open-source innovation continues to disrupt established markets, drawing parallels between the VMware transition and similar disruptions in AI, cloud computing, and beyond.

Whether you’re an IT leader considering your next move, a cloud architect evaluating OpenStack, or a business executive assessing the financial implications of migration, this session will provide real-world insights, expert perspectives, and actionable strategies to help you make informed decisions.

Join us for this deep dive into the future of virtualization and open-source infrastructure.

View Video and Transcript

Video and Transcript

[00:00:00] Todd Robinson: Hello, hello everyone out there. Hopefully we’ve got good sound coming through for you and good video coming through for you and We’ll kick it off here So I’m Todd Robinson from OpenMetal and I’m here with Jimmy McArthur out of the open infra foundation a favorite of ours. And so I hope we have a good conversation today about VMware and OpenStack and kind of the rough edges, the smooth edges and all the good things that OpenStack is bringing to the table to be able to help out in this change over in the VM world.

So, Jimmy, if you don’t mind, maybe a quick intro of yourself and then we’ll dig into some questions.

[00:00:45] Jimmy McArthur: Sure. First of all, thanks for, for having me on. Looking forward to the conversation. I’m Jimmy McArthur with the OpenInfra Foundation. I work in business development which for a nonprofit software foundation means I, I spend my days talking to users and operators of, of OpenStack public and private clouds all over the world.

So it’s a, it’s a pleasure to dig into, to What I think is a pretty meaty subject and kind of one of the most interesting business opportunities I’ve seen roll around in quite some time.

[00:01:18] Todd Robinson: Yeah, no, I think it’s a really exciting time for OpenStack both we, in the OpenMetal world, we sit we’re often bringing customers off of the public cloud the mega public clouds, you could call them.

And for us, that’s we’ve had great success there because there’s so much pressure, both price and just dissatisfaction with service levels and things like that in the public cloud. So for us to also see this opportunity, I’m rolling around from the VMware side. It’s been a bit of a challenge for us because they’re, we’re having great success already one area, but we also see this opportunity here.

So yeah, that’s what we’re here to talk about today. And Jimmy, if you don’t mind, maybe start us out with. What is the situation? Maybe a little bit about 2024. Things that happened. How did we get to this spot just to kind of get everybody on the same page?

[00:02:03] Jimmy McArthur: Yeah, sure. So you know, I think starting in in the beginning of 2024 well, sorry, backing up a little bit further Broadcom acquired VMware for those that don’t know.

And that kind of Yeah. Started taking shape at the, at the end of 2023 and was, was fully announced in 2024. And I think there was a lot of anticipation about what they were going to do. But what ended up happening was like more sort of out there, I think, than anyone would have, would have thought, you know, prices were increased for, for VMware users, sometimes up to 500 x, their, their, their current contract. So all of these new contracts are coming through and it created a lot of panic. I think it created a lot of question marks for, for decision makers that have possibly not looked at another solution besides VMware for a decade or more. And, and it resulted in, in the need for a lot of market education around what kinds of solutions are out there.

And, and how can I not get my company in this situation again? Yeah, no, I think we’re we started to see the the uptake and interest also in 2024. And I know well, some of the big questions that are always going to be out there is like, you know what, you are probably reliant on VMware as a company.

[00:03:28] Todd Robinson: And so at what stage are you really saying? Like, look, I am reliant right now, but I need to open the doors for myself in the future. So what I can think when you’re thinking about, like, The company situations that they’re in that they’re clearly got contracts. They’ve got agreements. They’ve got expertise in house.

You know, how do you start navigating this decision and maybe share with us a little bit about, you know, what might be the factors that have come up for you before or that are coming up now? And I’ve got, we’ve got our own take here at OpenMetal. I’ll join you with some thoughts after your, your view.

[00:04:03] Jimmy McArthur: Sure. Yeah. I think what I’ve observed is you’ve got sort of two buckets. One is The small to medium sized businesses that, that are running VMware, maybe they have for a long time. It’s, it’s a simple installation and, and it’s easy enough to, to look at moving off of VMware to, to something else.

And I can get into the, the why’s of, of why you should look at, at open source only a little bit later, but like this other bucket are folks that have a much more complex VMware installation. Their their VPC is maybe more complex than, and, and spread out across the company. You know, lots of, to your point, lots of folks that they’re paying to maintain this.

They’ve got maybe a, a super complicated network topology. So those folks are kind of holding to try to figure out what their next best steps are. And, and, and, and what the ecosystem around other solutions looks like.

[00:05:03] Todd Robinson: Yeah, interesting. I’ve, I’ve got I’m going to borrow actually from two, two different companies that recently recently signed in with us.

and their journey that they had, because I think they’re going to follow a little bit of what you’ve described. So let’s call them customary. Neither of these are actually public about it, and we’re, we’re great with that. We love being the behind the scenes open stackers. But what, yeah, but one of the companies they were, I guess you would call them a little bit, they haven’t reached the stage where they have automated the deployments of their systems.

And so, what they were faced with is many VPCs and didn’t have the ability to do anything but migrate. So the second case I’ll come back to the ones that are more comfortable with infrastructure as code and the ability to migrate by just recreation. But so the first group so OpenMetal basically works like this because there’s a learning curve. Typically with open stack when you’re coming out of VMware, we have private. We have these little miniature private clouds that you can just kind of hit the button and have a complete set back open stack. So first thing we did for this customer was okay. Look, you’re gonna you’re gonna need to get your yourself grounded.

Into okay used to do it with this this way for vmware now You’ve got to do it this way for open stack And so we gave them one of these clouds and at the same time And let their team get in there start getting familiar with this stuff We’ve got some tutorials and documentation to follow this. But in the and then in the end they event they they selected the type of Kind of permanent home that they’re going to need.

And then they had to go into a migration process. And so I think we’re probably going to flip a few names up here. So we as an OpenStack community member, we leveraged in this case some outside help from some companies that actually specialize in this work. We’ll, we’ll put some names up. there and that we’ve got some people helping us out.

But yeah, for us, it was great because we were able to leverage some of these other companies that their specialty was actually in this migration. So yeah, yeah. And I’m giving Jimmy, if you don’t mind before I jumped to the, to the larger scale one.

Yeah. If you don’t mind, maybe you chime in on that and just what you’re seeing and if that feels true to course, I guess that you have been seeing out there.

[00:07:13] Jimmy McArthur: Yeah, I think you know, as you mentioned, there are there’s cloud based solutions, Coriolis Vert2Vert I assume they’re going to roll through, so I’m not going to trouble myself naming them all, but there are lots of solutions to get VMware instances over to OpenStack, and I think for OpenStack.

For these smaller businesses, as you said, it’s, it’s, it’s kind of an easy move. And there are two tacks you know, one is migrating directly. And then the other one is standing up a brand new open stack instance. And, and then just kind of recreating things over there. And I think it kind of depends on what kind of tooling you’re using in VMware.

But, but I think, you know, to your point you know, OpenMetal provides this super clickable, super easy way to run OpenStack. And I think that’s, that’s really the kind of comfort zone that you need to put VMware users in.

[00:08:08] Todd Robinson: Yeah, I think the team there is skip forward into like Mirantis and Rackspace.

Actually, if you if you all don’t mind, rewind back to the Coriolis and high stacks. Yeah, those are those are the places that we want to be. But that is definitely what we found is that depending on the type of customer, let’s say if they’re this the medium size, the smaller, the very, very large, they have followed different patterns with us.

But the familiarity. With VMware and many, many people in a great way, they’re very brand attached to, to VMware and are even trepidatious a bit to get into the open stack world. And I would say, I think, like, if I was thinking about opportunity, I know we’re probably this video is going to be more of interest in many cases to people looking to pull these types of customers over versus just the customers that are, that are out there.

There are rough, depending on the type of. Customer that you’re targeting. There are some rough edges on being able to look at. Hey, this is the experience that customers have had on their used to and in the VM world and how they’re going to actually go through this process to get on to open stack and get familiar and find out which services.

What? How does it map? Which are the little bit areas that were like, you know, I don’t spend that much time in there on. I need better documentation or I need an easier way to do it. I definitely encourage companies to be looking at this kind of ideal customer profile and understanding where they sit in there.

And so and then you got to document stuff. You’ve got to take the time to be very clear about like, Hey, this is what it is. Is VMware is. Super productized. I mean, I always feel a little awkward when I’ve been there kind of going like, I feel like I’m back in the old days a little bit with the dashboards and how they’re almost like windows the old windows the type stuff.

But, but, but in reality, there’s a ton of great stuff inside of their system. And in many cases, people are looking for that. Yeah. So I think for us having an ecosystem that can support this yeah. I think there’s just, again, there’s huge upside, just like you said, to get us started is that, that upside is there.

So, Aaron, I was wondering a little bit, is it, if, if you don’t mind yeah, Jimmy, if you, if you could talk a little bit about your experience with the larger companies and what you’re seeing out there, and then I’ll switch over and I’ll kind of talk through what happened very recently for one of ours that came in.

[00:10:28] Jimmy McArthur: Sure. Yeah. And I would say within that larger bucket, there’s, there’s kind of two paths that, that people could take one. One would be, you know, we’ve got a big engineering team. We’re ready to make the move over to open stack today. We know we’re going to have to invest some, some time in it, but our, you know, what we’ve got is so massive.

And one of the customers that comes to mind is Geico who recently moved everything. Off of VMware and onto OpenStack. And you know, that’s a big undertaking. Obviously Geico is a massive company. You’re talking about workloads for their entire customer base, plus their internal private cloud use.

So, so big deployment, right? And, and they understand that they’re going to need to invest in, in their, their own data center footprint and, and their own engineers to manage that. And then on the other side, you have folks that are, you know, very comfortable with VMware and the support that they have provided over the years.

And you know they, What a 93 percent market share. So like it’s, it’s companies of all stripes are kind of looking at this thing. But I, so for this other kind of group, I think we see, you know, they’re looking for something like a commercially. Commercially supported distribution of OpenStack, right?

They, they want, you know, an OpenMetal or they want a red hat or a canonical, somebody that, that can really kind of help guide them and hold their hand and, and provide that kind of familiar interface that, that feels. a little bit more comfortable. And then in that instance, they don’t have to invest in those engineering resources.

[00:12:08] Todd Robinson: Yeah. So I think we’ve got an example actually that recently came through. So I was thinking we’re aligned with that. Let me kind of just give their journey with us. And that may actually help companies relate to this. So they run a very large infrastructure running on VMware. And in their case, they have both a blended hosted where they have gone to a hosting company.

And then they also have some stuff in the data center. And so their journey was they got they got the bill or they got the notice of what the bill was going to be. They have a certain time frame left on their contract. So one is I would just say for everybody. Open your contract, your agreements, make sure you know what your dates are.

They may be a good portion in the future, which gives you some time. But I would just say, go grab your legal or whoever signed that and be absolutely certain you know what that date is, because those can be super disruptive numbers. And so, and they were in that situation, they had it, they knew what their time frame was, and so they knew they had, they had some space until that contract was going to renew.

And so first thing they did was say, Hey they, they came into us and they said I, I see actually the, the QR code in the upper right there. I think that’s the, the team here, Ted told me that that will lead whoever wants to grab it from there to what I’m gonna describe is, so we allow companies to come on and essentially learn how OpenStack works.

So it was the same thing for this company, as they said, first, just gimme a cloud. Let me be familiar with this. And here is the documentation. And, and we’re, we’re, we’re very technically savvy. So they were very, very technical company and they got in there and they absorbed, they assigned a full, an engineer that was their core responsibility was to learn how this system worked.

So they. Took that person off whatever they were working on and put him on and said, Hey, you’re going to go in there and learn this. You’re going to follow this guide that OpenMetal has provided. You’re going to dig into the open stack documentation. You’re going to understand how this works. And they ran like that for a month or two.

They got on a regular cadence with us. So that engineer was meeting with us. We joined him up on our slack so that they could ask questions easily of engineer to engineer stuff. They spent a couple months on there. Kind of perfecting like, well, here’s how I automate it here. There were a terraform and Ansible company, so they were skilled there.

So they, they basically figured out, okay, I used to talk to VMware this way. I’m going to be talking to OpenStack this way. And so that went on for a little bit. They learned how to bring, bring services up and down. They learned kind of the, okay, here’s how we’re going to, set resources for projects VPCs analogous projects in OpenStack, and they essentially went and recreated now they are pretty savvy in the sense that they can create their deployments as infrastructure as code, which actually was very important.

for them when it came time to do the migration. So anyways, fast forward a couple months. They’ve gone through that process. They had brought several other team members up to speed. More people started to join into the project for them. Then they went to the production clusters, the production cluster that came online and they did, they were already 80 percent comfortable with this stuff.

They did their final tests and they had gotten to the point where they had. Relatively trivially able to just say, you know what? Stop creating these resources on VMware. Start creating them over here on OpenStack and started pointing their customers in. Now they’re only like 1 10th of the way through this process.

And so I would definitely encourage all the, either, you know companies out there that help us sell open stack to these or companies considering this is it does take time when there’s large systems and you’re not going to do it overnight, but know your end dates, you know, get your contract dates.

So that’s don’t don’t lose track of that 100%. And then just step into it open stack. Is incredibly powerful, like any big cloud system that you’re going to be using any big infrastructure system. But there’s the top 10 things that are important to you get to know those top 10 things build off of others.

Look at the documentation. I know that documentation could be a little bit overwhelming for people, but take your time and you do. You need to assign those staff members just time to do so, you know, and, and, and picking a, a D, you know, a pretty solid system administrator, you know, skills wise with a decent set of experience is really wise to kind of be your first person to get in there and learn and, and, and build off of others.

So, I, sorry, I ran on there, Jimmy, anything you want to kind of add to that as I was wandering along there?

[00:16:23] Jimmy McArthur: There’s a couple of things I would, I would touch on there and, and, you know, I actually. Was, was part of another program earlier today talking about very similar topic about around VMware migration.

And I think one of the points that, that those folks kept driving home, which I think is important is it’s important when you’re looking to move customers over to OpenStack to understand what they’re, What services they’re actually using in VMware, like a lot of, a lot of folks, maybe have a, like, they have the whole kitchen sink set of set of services of VMware, but maybe they only use a small fraction of them, right?

And I, and I think trying to understand what problems they’re trying to solve with their deployment and how you can make that move over to open stack and make that make sense to them is, is an important way to look at it. You know, there’s not. Necessarily 1 to 1 feature parity between VMware and OpenStack, but there are you know, there are projects that are very similar.

There are also a set of companies and that that can help fill the niche that that may be some of those partners that you were working with on your VMware install you know, different types of storage vendors, for instance, or different types of backup and recovery vendors and so really helping them understand what the OpenStack way is to do things and, and in a lot of cases you end up with Something that’s more powerful than what they had before, even if they had that whole kitchen sink from VMware.

And, and I think. Helping to communicate that to companies that it’s okay, this is a scary move, right? People have been stuck on this for, you know, a decade or more. And so making that move requires that new training, a new way of thinking. And, and that’s kind of what your job is as a, as a private cloud or a consultant on, on OpenStack is to help them understand how we do things.

[00:18:21] Todd Robinson: No, you’re dead on. Like we, that is a big part of the value. And I think we had always, we’re super techie. So sometimes I don’t think we give enough thought or justice to like, Hey, some of it’s just being willing to talk to them, share your expertise and then introduce them to the experts when it falls outside of your range.

Like I suspect that we’ll throw up Trilio. We love working with them. Storeware is another one that we’re excited to have more relationship with, but being able to turn to somebody to like Trillio and say, help us out with this. This customer is very concerned with disaster recovery and that isn’t we don’t have the breadth of experience that you do.

So let’s, let’s do something like this together. Because it is an ecosystem. I think when When I we do we do struggle with this a little bit and I think we’re learning also when you start to take on really large organizations Especially like coming off of VMware where it was very productized and it’s very everything is in this window right here When when a company is coming into us and realizing like actually I’m gonna go from you know A couple vendors may know maybe I was VMware on AWS or something.

So I’m gonna go from a couple vendors To like 6 or 7 that can be nerve wracking for them as a, as an organization that’s maybe not so used to that or didn’t like that before. And we’re happy to move to a smaller number of vendors and vendor relationships. So we’re trying to even explore is what is the right way to do that?

Should we be. The front company and working with them as, as partners, but that the agreement is with us to keep it simpler for enterprises and also to have an SLA, right? Like, sometimes a lot of what they’re, they’re buying is the SLA. It’s like, they don’t necessarily want to look under the hood. They’re going to look at you and go like, do you know what you’re doing?

And will you, will you back that up with like a legit SLA? That’s gonna, that will affect you if you don’t follow, you know, your, your guarantees. So, yeah, any thoughts on that? What do we see companies that are doing that well in the OpenStack world that are particularly good at these large and maybe even larger enterprise y type sales?

[00:20:29] Jimmy McArthur: Yeah, the one that comes to mind is Rackspace. You know, they’re sort of recently back as a platinum member of the OpenInfra Foundation. You know, they saw, you know, An opportunity like like OpenMetal did and like a lot of organizations did, and you know, they’re, they’re pivoting heavily into into OpenStack for their, their customers and they’re doing, you know, they’ve got a partnership with KT Telecom, they’ve got partnerships with, with other large telcos and, you know, there’s also, you know And again, canonical that, that are prepared to help you with this kind of like more complex and, and really want that sort of handholding.

And, but at the same time, you know, you look at a company like Rackspace and I want to go back a little bit because one of the, one of the fears, I think that. A lot of these companies have is, oh no you know, I just am trying to get out of this horrible VMware contract. They just put the screws to me.

Why would I want to jump into another commercial contract? And I think one of the things that, that OpenStack provides is this platform that like, you know, you can try it here. You can try it there and you could try it over there as well. And, and, you know, the freedom of having that open source software.

Solution is that you can move your workloads wherever you want, as long as it’s stays on OpenStack. And, and so, you know, with these companies, companies like Rackspace are doing something where they’ll help train up your VMware engineers. They’ll help set up your, your data center in house and, and then they’ll, they’ll leave you alone.

You know, once you’re, you’re ready to go. And so I think. Everywhere from, you know, back to the small to medium size to the, these very large solutions, I think there is an ecosystem out there that can help all these folks. And, and as you get larger and, you know, you become more successful in OpenStack, it’s easy enough to move your deployment to, to some other service provider, or maybe you want to move it in house and running yourself and so I don’t know.

Sorry, I’m rambling.

[00:22:38] Todd Robinson: Yeah, but it actually it is a pattern that we have seen for here is where actually a company does run their own open stack in house, but they also buy from us. And it’s partly they just accepted say, look, there’s a lot of knowledge out there. And the. Efficiencies that this is kind of a great thing.

I think now that we’re in this world of the, of the open stack as a, as a, an alternative that is absolutely coming up because of these drivers, the A. W. S. Mega cloud. Like, wow, you’re, you’re killing me with your costs. Like, I can’t do that as a business and having VMware, you know, I kind of here’s some interesting thoughts.

So this is an off script one for you. I’ll give you a thought is that when I when I saw I’ve been looking a lot at like the escalation and infrastructure costs that a lot of these medium, small, medium, large businesses have undergone, and it’s huge, both from driven by the mega clouds and then driven by something like this.

But a thought that I had is that because that spread between a lot of the open stack providers and these other ones have grown so large that I almost What I consciously say that the open stack community is we have some rough edges when it comes to being able to adopt our product. How should we use some of that spread to put more money into ironing out those rough edges.

So if you had to pick and I shared with you earlier that sometimes for me to get my head straight about up is I like to go look at the contrarians to my viewpoint. And so I watched this very, very savvy, very experienced VMware person who had been selling in the world of VMware for a long time. And his answer was, you don’t move, you bear the cost of this next renewal and then you give yourself more time.

But there are other alternatives and he was introducing the other alternatives. But he, he did not, he, he put it, he didn’t put up OpenStack as like a serious competitor. First off I got a comment for him. So I’m dropping that to him a little bit later, but yeah, give me, give me your view then of, is there some rough edges?

That we as the open set community should identify and say, hey, that’s a rough edge that makes it a little bit harder for people to adopt us, especially around these VMware target customers. Like, like, I wouldn’t don’t worry about, like you know, like, we run a ironic by cross in the data center. I think that is clearly like, I would never even think of replacing that.

Ever with something else, like this is brilliance when it comes to parts of OpenStack, but for the use case of these medium sized companies, it might be coming off of VMware. Anything that pops into your head that says, hey, we should iron that out will be easier to adopt.

[00:25:18] Jimmy McArthur: Yeah, and I would say, you know, this is something that this is the beauty of open source is the community already identified those things last year and they’re being put into the latest release of OpenStack, which is epoxy.

So you should be seeing changes. From projects that that might have been kind of for lack of a better word, it might have fallen off a little bit like Watcher. That has now had this renewed interest because folks are looking for some kind of, you know, something that works kind of like DRS, which is distributed resource schedule.

Huge feature in VMware doesn’t exactly exist today in OpenSec, but with this renewed kind of investment by the community, we should see that in Epoxy and we should see an even further improvement in Flamingo. I mean, in another, another one is, is freezer which is for kind of managing storage, I think I might be getting this wrong and this is what you get for the biz dev guy on the, on the technical call, but the point is that there are these investments in projects to try to kind of bring up.

Open, OpenStack to kind of meet those, that feature set that, that VMware users might be expecting. But, and again, I would also lean here on the ecosystem around OpenStack. And so even though it’s maybe a little scary to embrace some, some new companies, some new partners again, understand you have the same freedom there.

So if I, if I use Trilio for for my migration. Maybe I decide, I don’t know for the rest of my workloads. I want to move over to cloud based solutions and use Coriolis. That’s okay. And it all works together. And you kind of pick and choose who works best with you and who works best with your company and understands your goals.

The best

[00:27:07] Todd Robinson: for me. That’s it. Yeah. Watch your eye. You want to see guys don’t take it here because for me, when I’m going to. We is both the open source community or as a company are able to get close enough to the customer. And we’ve identified that that particular use case that what the customer is doing to just listen and go.

Okay. That’s the truck. That’s what you’re facing. And guess what? The next customer says something very similar. The next customer says something very similar. It really lets us as an ecosystem focus our energy into these places to make them better. Okay. And yeah, for what you just said is wonderful. Like I think that is a big deal for us.

And we definitely we run the standard open stack, you would call it. We don’t, we don’t kind of make our own or package our own. So for us, it’s very, we’re very dependent on the upstream to see these and go, yes, these are issues. And what we can contribute, of course, is important too. But to just hear you say that, which I don’t, I, of course I shouldn’t, I should have known that myself, but when you say that, that way, I think that’s a great thing for the community.

And some of those you know, projects that have been a little bit less loved are now the reason they existed were a real reason. And now it’s more clear to us why they were there in the first place. We get to double down on them and bring that parody up. So, yeah, that’s good stuff. So I don’t know if do you want to, if you’re looking forward, I think that’s some of it that you really covered already what we might expect in 2025 and beyond. Anything else you want to add to that? And then I got a couple other questions for you.

[00:28:40] Jimmy McArthur: Well, you know, the 1 thing I, I think it’s important to look at is, is understanding where your customer sits. You know, it’s I think talking about.

And this is a discussion you and I had a few days ago, you know, you talk about the different understanding of, of open source and the different understanding of, of of, excuse me, of where VMware is in the market, right? In North America people are on hyperscalers, you know, there’s a lot of VMware users.

Maybe they’re comfortable moving to hyperscalers, but I think you’re going to run into those same kind of price point problems, right? So in the U. S., you have to hit people in, in the, in like in pocketbook savings so that companies can understand, Hey, you know, I can save a lot of money if I move over to OpenStack.

And I think there’s a lot of FUD out there saying that it’s going to cost 5, or something to move over. I that’s I, the numbers I’ve seen are closer to like 300, maybe. If it’s a really complex VM, maybe it’s 1, 200, right? But the, the other thing is like other countries where there’s opportunity for, for sales and, and for you to gain new customers, they have a very different understanding.

Maybe open source is kind of a, a bad word in those areas, or they don’t really have the, the knowledge about. How to contribute to an open source community or, or what that means for their business. And so, you know, I’m thinking of like Southeast Asia, for example. But then, you know, you move over to Europe where digital sovereignty initiatives have pushed everything over to open source, right?

They, they don’t want to work with hyperscalers. They don’t want to work with VMware either. They, they’re going to embrace those open source solutions. So, just, Having that in mind when you’re looking for new customers and you’re, you’re looking to give advice, I think is, is really important because you might have to do a little bit more education about, you know, not just what OpenStack is maybe, but what the open source philosophy is and, you know, back to the watcher example of how, what the power of that is for, for being able to address customer needs and to address market needs.

[00:30:56] Todd Robinson: Yeah, no, that’s a really interesting point to about the differences in the, in the regions. And yeah, and for us, we offer in the U. S. we offer in Europe or and we’re opening up over in Singapore here this year. And so yeah, it’s pretty interesting. The, the differences. I definitely, you know, this is a generalization, but I’ll say this, like, when you’re talking to the European customer that you’re much more likely to be in this open source tribe together, whereas, yeah, in the in the US, you’re definitely often fighting brand attachment, even though they know it’s not good for them.

They’re like, I, you know, I love this. A, B and C. We need to have a B and C. Like how, you know, how a W. S. sets up the dual routers for their B. P. N. as a service. And how does open stack do that? Okay, you gotta do it a little bit differently with us. But they’re also like, It’s, I, I still wanna do it that way.

And you’re like, well, you can, but look at what it costs you and look at how far and distant you got from the technology when you did that. So it’s not only just the dollars, it’s, you’re just very dis distant from the technology. And so what kind of damage can that do, do to you, especially if you’re like a very technical company and, and part of the products or the service or SaaS or whatever is very technical.

So yeah, we definitely find ourselves. U. S. Introducing and advocating a little bit more. Yeah, for me, I’m excited to see. Oh, sorry. Go ahead.

[00:32:16] Jimmy McArthur: Brand is, is, is kind of funny, but you’re right about that. But, like, being attached to a brand is how everybody got where they are with VMware, right? You know, and, and, and moving over to some other proprietary solution isn’t going to help you in the long run.

And that’s why I’m You know, encouraging those folks to look beyond that brand, you know, that their boss signed off on forever ago, doesn’t want to maybe admit that they made a bad decision or, or feels comfortable with, with AWS, even though they’re gouging on, on every monthly bill you know, it looked beyond that.

And, and I think, you know, you’re selling things exactly the right way is like, Hey. You can have a huge cost savings here. You can be just as secure in OpenMetal as you, as you can on AWS or VMware, I think that’s a really important message.

[00:33:04] Todd Robinson: Yeah, I think we’re excited. I mean, for us, this is a little history of OpenMetal just because you know, I was never a VMware savvy user.

And so it’s been really interesting for us to start to become more and more skilled. And we’ve been lucky enough. Our business model tends that they tend to be, we kind of operate in what we call the tipping point areas. This is when a customer has reached a size where they’re like, hey, you know, the public cloud or even small, small systems like VMware.

Well, back in the day, not anymore. They used to be great. They were, they were really efficient for those smaller use cases. Like, I got an idea. Let me just get the resource fire up and just rolled. Proof it out and see what it is. And that is still a wonderful thing that the public clouds bring to the to the table today.

But we operate tend to be in this tipping point where customers are at a certain scale. So they’ve gone past that they no longer want that that instant on cost in that instant on like need because these systems for them are steady state. They’ve been running it, you know, many, many dollars each month for a long time.

And so For us, I think we look we’re lucky enough to be able to work really closely with these customers. And so our VMware knowledge is increasing and increasing. And so I think for us, we, we’ve now targeted to say, okay, that is going to be a staple of our business because both it. It aligns with us philosophically that says, Hey, we’re helping people own their own cloud, own their own technology, like, be close to the technology, kind of respect the open source contributions that are there.

And so I think partly we’re really excited that customers are teaching us stuff. We get to be so close that I go, Oh, yes, that’s what that’s how you should do it. And it’s interesting for for us For at least for me, as I get for OpenMetal, the growth has been really exciting. But people often say, all right, when you’re at a certain size, growth is relatively straightforward.

You know, if you’re doubling or more than that, well, at a certain size, you’re, you’re, you’re going to face this. Well, I’m really large. How do you keep that up? And, and I was looking, I was going, Okay, we’re pulling from obviously the public cloud. So that’s a massive, that’s a massive place to pull stuff.

But then this kind of just like rolled into our laps where it was like, Whoa, VMware is about to push a whole bunch of customers onto the market.

[00:35:20] Jimmy McArthur: Right?

[00:35:20] Todd Robinson: Like, that’s a really interesting thing. So if you don’t mind, give give me an idea of what do you think might happen as we’re looking forward? Is there You know, are we at the beginning of the, the, the moves, where are people in their contracts?

Maybe what might we expect for 26, maybe 27? Yeah. And what you might, what you might expect there.

[00:35:41] Jimmy McArthur: Yeah, I mean, the, the short answer is this has got a long tail. You know, there, there are lots of companies that ended up renewing their, their VMware contract. I think you mentioned earlier in the show, somebody’s advice was, well, maybe stay put for a minute and make sure you’re making the right move.

And I think that’s, that’s prudent. A lot of, a lot of these larger companies can absorb that cost. And, and until they, they can figure out something. So, you know, a lot of them renewed just at the end of 2023, or just at the beginning of 2024. so you might see those folks popping back up in 3 years. But, you know, from now until at least the next 5 years, I would expect this kind of trajectory to continue and folks will have either Take care.

Decided to just absorb that, that VMware costs and, and, and Broadcom will have their, their premium customers that they so desperately want. And, and everybody else is going to have made a decision at that point. And so I think, you know, the next five years is really about what can we do? At the OpenInfra Foundation, you know, what, what can we do as an ecosystem of, of companies that are part of OpenStack to help educate the market and, and teach people why signing up for something that doesn’t lock you in and doesn’t put you in vendor lock in is better for your long term growth and sustainability.

[00:37:09] Todd Robinson: Yeah, no, I’m definitely with you. Yeah. So I think on our side, we’re continuing to get better at this. Continuing to publish content that tells about the experiences that the customer had, including some of the technical challenges sometimes that they run into. I know we’ve got to do a few more releases around that just and also just expertise in house to say, yeah, you’re looking at this service.

You don’t need to do that anymore. Like that’s actually an older way of doing it. There’s an easier way to do that nowadays. And here’s how open stack, how you can leverage open stack. Would you do that? Yeah, no, I think it’s really exciting. Would you, would you think that there, there must be pretty good reaction in the private.

Proprietary world to is that they’re they’re probably also growing, I guess, getting more aggressive or what do you, yeah, what do you see there?

[00:37:57] Jimmy McArthur: From like, are you talking about like Nutanix or something along those lines? Could be?

[00:38:01] Todd Robinson: Yeah. Yeah. Like Nutanix or even though open source alternatives, but yeah, sorry.

Go ahead.

[00:38:06] Jimmy McArthur: Oh, yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, you mentioned proprietary. So, you know, there are, I think there are opportunities. It is. People are making choices to, to move off of VMware onto other proprietary systems. I would say that that’s a bad move. And for, for the, all the reasons that Broadcom gave you who’s to say that those companies can’t pull the exact same stunt and, and increase your, your contract.

And in fact, I’ll take this opportunity to plug you mentioned sort of educating your customers and, and we’re doing the same thing at OpenInfra. We have a VMware Migration Working Group that is for members of the OpenInfra Foundation. Last year we published a white paper around kind of comparing and contrasting VMware to, to OpenStack but also letting people know what, what migration tools are available.

This year we’ll be much more focused on what is the state of OpenStack today what kind of vendors are out there that can help you with this move. And I’m not, I’m talking beyond just migration, but, but really helping you with your long term decision making. And, and so, you know, I, I would just continue to hammer home that choosing open source software is, is just the best path forward for, for you and your organization in the same way that people, Linux is the de facto, you know, is the de facto operating system for almost every major business today.

Except for people, I guess, still on VMware. Why, you know, if you trust Linux, then you should trust OpenStack and you should trust other open source alternatives.

[00:39:43] Todd Robinson: Yeah, no. Yeah, I think I’m, I’m, I’m definitely there. I’m in that spot to where I think I don’t I don’t question that this is going to be a major source of growth for OpenStack and that it will also.

And again, going back to that. You all are really listening. and then to the customers of the end users is that it’s going to drive improvement in OpenStack. So for me, I think it’s we’re thrilled, right? That that we’re actually watching this happen on the net. Yeah, that we get to benefit from it and be part of the be part of the process.

So one is, I would say that’s an exciting part of it. I know, I know sometimes when, we dig in and talk about like options or how you actually map things from the the VMware world over into the OpenStack world a bit. We also, of course, bleed in, so I’ll give a shout out to Seth for those of you who may not realize that it’s one of the most common Commingled software with OpenStack that provides storage and so like you’ll see things like vSAN and live migrate and not live migration vMotion, sorry over in the, in the in the world of VMware.

But there’s comparable systems inside of OpenStack. So a lot of times people are like, Oh, this is really important to me that I can easily take, take a hardware node out of the system because I have this V motion. I have this ability to live migrate well with a properly configured OpenStack. In our case, backed by Seth, there are other way other providers underneath that could be doing the storage layer.

But for us, in the case of Seth, you can have confidence that you can actually. Do the same thing. So if you need to depopulate a server for whatever reason, let’s say sometimes it’s simple stuff like, Oh, actually, I just want to relocate the server. You know, the power I’ve got. I’ve got open power somewhere else.

I just need to relocate that. You should have confidence that these major components that are typically had. They have to be done, whether it’s maintenance tasks, it’s services that need to be provided is that OpenStack has those. This is a rich and long, vibrant past that supports the quality of what the OpenStack’s product is today.

And so sometimes I think companies are nervous about, well, can it do A, B and C? And the fact is, it’s a very, very rich ecosystem. And pretty much, yes, the answer is yes, it can do A, B and C. C. And you might just have to learn a little bit of different nomenclature. You know, it’s not the motion.

It’s like migration. And yes, you do have to have a properly set up storage system that supports that so that it’s kind of this instant, you know, one ping drop or no ping drops as that stuff actually occurs. But so I always shout out to seth those and we implement stuff. Both hyperconverged with OpenStack.

And again, this has been going on for a long time in the industry, so we’re very familiar and the industry is very familiar with letting those hyperconverge together and being stable and supportive of each other. We also run them autonomously sometimes as well. And so I’m actually not so familiar with what VMware’s kind of object storage approach would be.

And so I probably should be so I shouldn’t ask those questions that I should probably in the future. But since you’re here, Jenny, I get that. I get to do that. What? Yeah, give me a sense of your guys’s take on on Seth and where it fits in. And then if there’s anything on the VMware side to it.

Kind of help our VMware people looking to shop off VMware. What are some of the things that they might look at where they say, Hey, actually, Open SAC has complimentary systems like SAP to make sure that you can, you know what they are, and you know that Open SAC works brilliantly with it.

[00:43:06] Jimmy McArthur: Yeah, so I would say not only does, like, are you making a good transition, but Open SAC is an opportunity to, to modernize your workloads.

And if you look at using Open SAC and Kubernetes together, you’re going to have Many of the same choices that you, you had with VMware and also a whole bunch of new ones and, and you know, there are features in OpenStack that work better than than what you’ve got in VMware, like Keystone, for example is, you know, I think, what is it, RBAC is, is in VMware it’s like Keystone is much more powerful.

Then active directory, which VMware uses there’s a restful integration. There’s you know, a suite of APIs that you can use that just things that you just don’t really have access to on VMware that you do on open stack. I will shut up on this topic though, because it gets, starts to get a little bit more technical than, than what I’m capable of, especially around what.

Features are on VMware storage. I don’t know the answer to

[00:44:15] Todd Robinson: that. Got it. Okay. No, but you bring up a great point that because OpenStack is, one of its very large use cases is with providers. And providers are an infrastructure as code API first mentality nowadays. Just because in order to Do these large scale.

You have to function that way. You’re not, you’re not going to be in a gooey setting stuff up for customers. You’re providing you’re doing it via API. So that’s an awesome point that as you move out of the VMware world, there are new opportunities because some of the stuff that open stack is driven by that mentality.

And so rich API is an API first attitude. It may be a great opportunity for you as a VMware runner to say, like, you know, I’m tired of having to write tutorials to teach people to go in and do this thing in the interface when you should be doing it infrastructure as code or via the API. So yeah, I think maybe if we get a chance again to talk, Jimmy, a focus in that area, I think would be great.

I kind of, of course, forgotten that, right? We are an API first type company, so we naturally gravitate towards that without realizing that that could be a real opportunity for people to take. to take that advancement. I see. We also got it. Yes. If you don’t mind, we have a question here that we saw pop up.

I think that one’s more in your world. If you don’t mind, maybe take that one.

[00:45:35] Jimmy McArthur: Sure. Yeah, I think the question is why VMware and not, for example, Citrix. Good question. I believe Citrix users would also benefit from moving to open source solutions. But I think why the focus on VMware right now is, is just because of what VMware has kind of done from a contract perspective to their customers.

Citrix hasn’t done that yet, but they could which is, which is sort of the point is, is when you’re going with single vendor proprietary solutions, you run the risk of. You know, is the company sound, is the company going to change my, my contract or license on a whim. And, and so when you go with a stable open source project.

That has hundreds of companies contributing to it and thousands of companies relying on it to run their business, then you have a much better opportunity to to make a safe decision from a management perspective and from a cost perspective.

[00:46:38] Todd Robinson: Yeah, that sounds great. Cool. I know we’re starting to get close to wind down.

So I think we’re, if you don’t mind, let’s look, let’s spend a little bit of time in just this subject, which is when, if you’re hesitant about leaving VMware or if you yeah, your fate, you’re kind of facing this. So maybe it’s it’s probably something we can both weigh in on. But Jimmy, if you don’t mind, maybe the first one really is, is like, if you’re, Okay.

Hesitant about leaving VMware, you know, what, what’s our macro advice? What kind of guidance would we be giving companies that are in this situation?

[00:47:13] Jimmy McArthur: I would say look for a trusted partner and, and look for you know, you’re not on your own out there. You know, there are consultants you can look at the OpenStack marketplace, openstack.

org slash marketplace and find everything from. Commercial distributions of OpenStack to independent consultants that can help you make those decisions to a lot of those migration providers that we mentioned. There’s, you know, it’s, it’s a big new world and you know, a big part of, of ensuring success when VMware is, is a, you want to take care of your, your employees.

Those folks that have been loyal employees to you and been working on VMware help train them on a new technology that’s, that’s going to last far into the future. And, and then also help future proof your business by, by sticking with an open source solution that allows you to work with those different partners.

And, and, you know, there’s a lot that you can learn out there. And I think. Moving towards cloud native modern workloads is, is ultimately good for, for business in the long run. And there are tons of people that can help you do it.

[00:48:27] Todd Robinson: Yeah, that’s a great, great answer. And again, you see, I’m taking a little bit of notes.

So I like it when I hear somebody say something very salient for me or resonates with me. I’m like, Oh, I got to write that down. So I’m sorry if you see me glance it off screen here. I’m taking notes.

[00:48:39] Jimmy McArthur: Yeah.

[00:48:40] Todd Robinson: Yeah, yeah, you know, following that I’ll give a compliment to that. I think so from our side, if, if we were addressing this kind of same question, so first partner, the marketplace on open infra.

Yes, absolutely. Super solid place to find all kinds of companies that have joined the community and that are present and active. And, and definitely I’ll. It’s great that that patronage of those organizations help the mother organization be stronger. So, again, we always thank people that are traversing through that, at least learning about the brands there through the open for site.

Yeah, you kind of I’ll take a little more tactical view of this. I think I mentioned before, get your, get your dates in order, check your contracts, check what’s going on. Because you are going to have to deal with it. Like it’s just, this is the situation. So you do have to deal with it. But like Jimmy, you just said like, well, there are ways that you can turn this around and look at your staff and say, actually, this is going to be another skillset, another way to kind of raise up and challenge them, you know, and good engineers.

They want. Good challenges, right? They’re going to look at this stuff and say, all right, this is kind of cool. Now I definitely say in the U S the engineer, sometimes they’re like, Oh boy, open stack, huh? Okay. Let’s, let’s get them. Versus some of the Europeans are like, yeah, open stack. Let’s do it. Right.

Right away. They, because they recognize they want to be part of that tribe. But, but I would also say one of the challenges is that you’re going to end up running a project that costs money. Next to paying that typical monthly or, or longer term costs that, that you have. So you, you want to be cognizant about this, but I, but I can, I think I can go on record is that you will recover those costs once you’re over on.

OpenStack and it does, it does take some time and it takes some learning. It takes some stretching of, of your engineers and your, maybe even yourself to say like, yes, this is going to be a little bit different, but rest assured, I can say this with absolute confidence because we literally do it every day that you will make up those dollars of having to run this program or project.

together. So it doesn’t mean it’s overnight. You got to look a little bit further ahead. But you can also talk to those vendors that are out there. We’re one that’s like this. We typically work in agreements and we very much know that this is happening. And so we often can try to help mitigate that crossover time, both with whether we can get easy access to things were for training purposes.

It doesn’t cost anything again. You can QR code and you’ll see it immediately. But that you you can With confidence when you’re going into your CFO and saying like, look, not, not just only do we have to get off this because we’ve got this impending doom approaching, you might very well have a drop in cost to your today’s dollars.

So not even what it was going to be when you were going to get that renewal, but that after you make this transition, you can rest assured that we’re in the open source world. We’re aligned with being smart about spending a dollar. No question that that I think nations like that. Sorry. Go ahead. Yeah,

[00:51:50] Jimmy McArthur: I think you’re the total cost of ownership.

Yes, you’re gonna it might be a little bit painful when you 1st transition is you get people trained up and maybe you have to get new hardware or or maybe you have to pay for some new services, but long term and I’m not even talking about like years. I’m talking about Six months, you’re going to see a massive savings between what you were paying with VMware or hyperscalers compared to what it costs to run an OpenStack.

No question,

[00:52:20] Todd Robinson: no question. Yeah. And so I know sometimes that’s really a difficult thing because companies like, oh, shoot, I’m going to have to do a little more work right now to obviously pull this off. But I would also say, like, you have a date that’s approaching that can be very Yeah. Yeah. Very painful.

And just again, knowing based upon what you’re paying today, if you had made that transition, you already would have had a cost savings benefit plus new technology and closer, closer to these things. So yeah, I think that’s, I’m trying to think if there’s anything else I want to kind of weigh in on that is, look. Yeah, look for again in the marketplace is great over it. Open infra. Yeah, open open stack. Sometimes I like to address this one, too, if you don’t mind. Sometimes it bothers me to no end. So I’ll say this. If you search for a bunch of open stack stuff, you’re going to see Google is going to suggest you is open stack dead.

And I just want to say it’s so irritating to me when I do this. So anyways, I’m just going to get a little fired up here. There’s no question that this is a vibrant and growing team. Community. So Jimmy, you probably know the numbers maybe better than I do. Yeah, we’ve

[00:53:23] Jimmy McArthur: got a 110, 000 community members. There’s, I believe from 183 different countries, I think that’s right.

But, but yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s a massive, massive group of people who get together at events all over the world. The software is well supported. It’s well maintained, I know, because I, I know lots of the maintainers you know, businesses are fully invested in OpenStack and many of them, just like OpenMetal have based their entire business on it.

It’s, it’s a healthy, vibrant ecosystem, and that’s why. Not only is it not dead, it’s very much alive and it’s a better alternative to one company holding your company hostage. So

[00:54:05] Todd Robinson: that on the market. Yeah, bet on the market bet on. There’s there is like Jimmy just said, there’s so many people around the world that actively support this.

There’s tons of business models that are very successful. There’s very, very large hyperscalers actually who under the hood both either have a smattering of open stack or have a lot of open stack. Yeah, right, right. So this is what I say is you always want to share the though people sometimes they have a brand impression of OpenStack.

It is very mature, very supported, very enthusiastic people and then market forces that are that are re embracing it, you know. And so anyways, I think I think we’ll have to end Jimmy. I know we’re hitting our time here, but. I appreciate everybody who joined us and Jimmy, thank you for sharing and being a champion out there for us, you know, and for open, open infra again, it’s such a very exciting thing for me to see some of these watcher, for example, some of these projects that we, we all do depend on because we’re often selling to people that depend on those to see the renewed interest in there.

So very exciting. And we’re looking forward to this year and next year and helping people get off of VMware onto something they should be open source on. So. Yeah. All right. Any last words or we’ll sign off here.

[00:55:16] Jimmy McArthur: No, thank you. Thank you so much, Todd, for the opportunity. I enjoyed the discussion. And if you’re interested in in, in joining the Open Infra Foundation, hit me up.

I’m on LinkedIn. I’d be happy to talk to you about it.

[00:55:28] Todd Robinson: All right, Jimmy. Thanks everybody. Definitely appreciate it. We’ll see you next time.

[00:55:32] Jimmy McArthur: Have a great day. All right. Bye bye.

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