Leaving VMware Means Leaving vSAN: Your VMware Exit Is Really a Storage Decision

Most VMware exit plans start with the hypervisor. For organizations running vSAN, the hypervisor is the easy part. vSAN ships as part of the VMware stack, so leaving VMware also means leaving the storage layer that holds every production VM. A hypervisor migration becomes a storage migration, and few exit plans account for it.

vSAN customers have three realistic paths. They can rebuild on another vendor's HCI stack and accept a new form of lock-in. They can return to the external SAN they spent years retiring. Or they can move to an infrastructure operating system that runs compute, storage and networking in a single code base. Each path comes with its own cost, migration timeline and hardware impact.

In this session, Dave Vincent and Aaron Richman walk through each option in the detail IT architects need to make the call. They cover how vSAN data moves off VMware, which servers you can keep in production and how to avoid a second refresh cycle a year after the first. Dave closes with a demonstration of the migration process from his lab.

Attendees Will Learn

• Why vSAN customers face a harder VMware exit than SAN customers
• What each exit path costs in licensing, hardware and migration effort
• How to move vSAN workloads onto existing servers and skip the second refresh