Transcript
be an alternative to VMware, right? So how do you get through all of that? And so what we've done is we have the good fortune of, and I'm going to ask him in a moment to introduce himself further, but we have the good fortune of having, Jerome went with us today. Jerome is the CEO and principal analyst at DCIG and his team, they have just completed what is arguably the most comprehensive VMware alternative evaluation ever, certainly available on the market today for sure. 19 solutions they narrowed down to, 425 features, and he's going to walk us through the framework that they built and share exactly what separated the top five from the rest. Spoiler alert, you might've expected this, we're part of the top five, but why? That's what we're going to take a look at today. And also today we have Bob Matanog here. Bob is a principal solutions architect here at Verge.io and he's about 30 ish minutes from now. He's going to take us through a demo, a live demo of migrating VMware into Verge and kind of teach you a little bit, show you mostly what does it look like? I used to call it a light lift. I don't even, it's, I don't even think it's a lift, honestly. So I stopped calling it that, but that's what Bob's going to do. So and throughout, this is really important. We so appreciate you spending time with us, taking the time to be here. If you have questions or when you have questions, as I suspect you will, please put them in the chat. And then what we'll try to do is answer them as they come in and as we're able, et cetera. And so, so let's try to keep them all in the chat and we'll try to get to them all as best as we, as we can. Okay. So let's get started. Jerome, thank you so much for being here. We really appreciate your time, your effort that you've put into this. Before we dig into, you know, the, the methodology, maybe you can help us with some context. Like what is, what is even driving so many organizations to look at VMware Alternatives right now? Yeah. So Aaron, thank you so much for having me on today, you and Bob and Verge.io for just inviting me and for everyone who's joining. Thanks for joining in today. I know this is, this topic has been like, you know, sort of burning on everyone's mind. Like, you know, what's, what's driving all this interest in VMware Alternatives? And, you know, as most of you might suspect, it's, you know, really the licensing changes that VMware made here over the last few years. I remember when it was first announced, man, what was that, you know, two, three years ago already when Broadcom announced it was going to acquire VMware and I was sitting at, I think it was VMworld down in Vegas or wherever they had it at that time. And a lot of the, a lot of the analysts in the room were all quizzing, both Broadcom and VMware were up on stage and they're kind of quizzing them and Broadcom was very elusive in answering the questions about how, how things were going to change. And a lot of analysts were kind of, you know, very suspicious or, you know, again, we did have a whole lot of, even the analyst community did not have a lot of clarity what was going to happen. And then I think, as you all know, about, you know, two and a half years ago or about almost two years ago now, in December that day, well, you know, we're going to simplify licensing for VMware. We're basically going to three, you know, three and a half, you know, 3.3 licensing versions, you know, with the VC, you know, VMware Cloud Foundation, VMware vSphere Foundation and the vSphere. And so that, you know, that really just started this whole avalanche of change. And again, probably VMware had to do something or Broadcom had to do something. I mean, I think that I read somewhere that, you know, literally thousands of licensing options for end users, which, you know, on one hand for an end user, that's great to have a thousand options, but on both sides, it creates a lot of complexity and trying to figure out, you know, every contract is unique for every user. So, but, you know, they go down to three and all of a sudden people are used to all this flexibility and now they literally have none. And, you know, that's sort of started the first wave. And then, of course, with the simplicity also come, I think, you know, we all read the stories, price increases of 3 to 10x and you couldn't get perpetual licensing anymore. And, you know, just on and on it went. So here we saw the first flood and then, you know, here we are two years later, I think they kind of officially announced it just a month ago, early January, and now vSphere by itself will no longer be available at the end of 2027. And so, you know, people thought, OK, well, at least I can still use vSphere at some level. Now it's VCF or VVF. And, you know, and again, that is just like a whole nother, you know, here we see another round of price increases. I mean, just going to vSphere alone was one thing. So, you know, like to your point you made early on, Aaron, you know, you know, VMware, again, and again, this is not to disparage any of the other products, but VMware is just, you know, really a very robust product. And it has a lot of feature and functionality. But as also most of us know, most companies cannot use all that feature and functionality that they have in there. And certainly don't want to, you know, they can't afford to pay for it all when they only may use a percentage of it. So that's kind of where we are today, where companies like, you know, I love VMware, but man, I mean, I'm not going to pay 10, 20x what I'm paying for now for the features that I use. So that is part of this whole evaluation of VMware alternatives and what's in the marketplace. Exactly. So thank you. That's exactly what I am hearing. I get to, I have the privilege of speaking to most of our prospective customers for the first time as a representative of Verge. So I hear this every day from you guys, from your peers, etc. And it's very real. And so it's not even optional. Like the clock is ticking. You have to choose. There is no not choosing. You're choosing to either stay and take it, whatever it is, or look around. So speaking of that, Jerome, how has the landscape changed? So there's this moment shift. What's changed, if anything? Yeah. So, you know, when we looked at the marketplace, you know, and, you know, we first did a report on this about a year and a half ago. We were like, I think one of the first analysts to come to market this with a VMware alternatives type thing. And at that time, we just called it vSphere alternatives. We actually changed the title to VMware alternatives because at one time, I think people were just looking at a hypervisor alternative. Right. But as organizations started to go into this evaluation, they began to realize, well, we, you know, we do use some, you know, virtual, you know, virtual SAN or virtual storage options. We do use virtual networking. So it became more like a, it almost became more like a private cloud alternative as opposed to just a VMware alternative. And so that, so really the conversation, you know, and people began to think, well, and do I, do I want to do the same thing that I did? You know, do I want to get locked in? Again, no, no disparaging anyone, but, you know, do I want to get locked into Verge Iogin, their hypervisor or someone else's hypervisor? So, you know, how do we potentially move into Kubernetes or how do we have this platform that gives us that flexibility? So, so it becomes a much broader decision. So they don't get, you know, essentially get, you know, face the same problem three, five years, three or five years down the road again. So, you know, it's like, you know, do they support Kubernetes? Can we go to containers though? So we have a choice between containers and virtual machines and can we transition? So that, so that was sort of one thing that just even changed in the mindset of companies as they began to look at this more holistically and sort of the initial, you know, got, you know, got a sticker shock and began to move down this path. And of course, you know, you and your competitors, you want to say, there's a market opportunity here. So we've seen as a lot of, you know, you know, comparatively speaking, we've seen, you know, three big things. One, a ton of innovation. Okay. And just in the last 18 months, I mean, I've told you there's been more innovation in competitive products, probably the last 18 months than in the last 10 years, because suddenly companies like yourself and others are making budget for this stuff because, you know, before, yeah, we were trying to get people. We were sort of focused on a core set of clients where we thought we could win. Now everyone's suddenly a client. Suddenly everyone's like, hey, you know, you're being invited into opportunities. And it's like, man, you know, we can now innovate and compete against these products or against these features where people were pretty locked into VMware before. They're now willing to, you know, so, so that's the one thing you see just a ton of innovation and it's happening very quickly. The other thing is you're going to see not so much from Verge, but some of the other competitors, they have, you know, two or three different products in their portfolio. So it's not so much simple as saying, well, if I go, you know, Verge, you know, it's actually pretty simple. I mean, here's our portfolio. We offer all these things. Some of you have to like, you know, kind of nuance, like, hey, well, they have this product and this product, then this other product. And it's not even really clear on the, you know, when you look at their documentation, which one is which and which features are included, so it's become very nuanced. Some are more targeted, you know, towards smaller, some are more comprehensive, some have new partnerships. Right. Some of it, and then the other thing too is just new providers have come into market. One, you know, one company I know very well, you know, it's, you know, it's a quote unquote competitor of yours. I don't want to put them in the same class as you, but they said they've had it literally running in their shops for three, four or five years, but they never brought it to market because they're within the demand. All of a sudden, like, you know, they went from having it run in their labs to suddenly, you know, slapping a skew. I mean, I'm saying this somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but slapping a skew on it and bring it to market. Now, I mean, they did more than that, obviously, but, you know, that's essentially what's happened. And they weren't, you know, they weren't the only ones who had to, you know, they basically just productized it and got it ready to come to market and put a skew on it. And now, but as you're well aware, it takes a lot to support a product, a bill of support staff to understand all the different ways to qualify hardware. That all takes time. So that's really what I've seen over the last, you know, really 18 months specifically as this has all come about. Absolutely. Well, so thanks for elaborating on that, Jerome. And to your points, what we've seen in our conversations with folks, right, is a lot of, now to their credit, I don't want to speak to anyone's motives. To their credit, a lot of companies are trying to help. The way that they are able to go about it in many cases is, hey, there's a market condition. We've got something that sort of kind of maybe can help. Let's put, you know, like a KVM-based hypervisor. Now we've got something. And helpful is helpful. However, one of the things I don't want to steal, well, let me not, let me not steal any of your thunder, but that's not Verge.io. Verge.io is a longstanding platform that happens to be exceedingly well-suited for this market condition that has arisen. I actually want to pause for a second real quickly, and I want to remind and encourage people that if you have questions for Jerome, for us in general, please feel free to put them in the chat. And I want to just kind of shout out, we have a number of customers on the webinar. Thank you guys for, I see you. Thank you for being here. Feel free, you're not obligated, well, to even be here, number one, or number two, to answer questions, but feel free if you see a question that you have some personal experience with and you want to jump in and answer it, please go right ahead. And I also see some of our really important partners here on the webinar. So thank you to all of you because you make all the difference. And being here is just very special for us to see that you're continuing to feel great about Verge, support us, and et cetera. So, all right, Jerome, back to the matter at hand, right? So everybody's, let's not say, many people, if not most, are under pressure to make a decision, right? Even not making a decision is in fact making a decision. Yeah, I mean, the decision will be made for you and you'll feel it in your pocketbook if you just, you know, if your decision is to spend more, yeah, that's an understandable decision, but it's, you know, it may be very costly for you considering how much you may use. What, 100%. So, okay, so not all options are equal. We recognize that. So that brings us to the point where I want to have you talk about your evaluation framework that your team built and kind of walk us through how you approached this. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, maybe a little background about DCIG. I mean, I often consider myself the accidental analyst, okay? I mean, when I actually started out, you know, like many of the end users or customers out there, I started out in your shoes. I worked for a law enforcement firm for a number of years. Then I worked for an insurance company. Then I actually went to work for a Fortune 500 company in their data center, and that's really where I was introduced to, you know, some of the underlying tenets that DCIG uses in doing its evaluation. When I worked there, before we even brought products in, we actually did sort of like a paper evaluation. So, like when he talks about, you know, 30 products, 425 features, that's what we would do internally. My entire technical, you know, the senior architects, the senior engineers would all get together, and we'd have like this, you know, massive spreadsheet, like all the features we cared about. And, you know, again, we didn't look at, you know, because of who we were, we didn't look at, you know, 35 products. We looked at 5, 10, you know, maybe 15 products. And then, you know, we scored each feature, and, you know, we list all the features we cared about, and then we scored each one. And, you know, it was generally pretty simple, one, two points, you know, something like that. But at the end of the day, after we looked at, you know, created the features we want, scored them, and went through and evaluated the products, and we scored, you know, what it supports. So, basically, just come up, you know, internally come up with a short list. Let's say, okay, and then they had to meet a certain criteria. They had to reach a certain score. Say, okay, these are the, it has to have these core features, and it has to have a certain score. And then, like the top-ranked products, we would then basically give to our procurement team, and they'd pick, you know, those three to five products that the vendors would then bid on it. So, we know no matter, so it helped kept the providers honest in our case. Yeah. Let's say, hey, listen, these are competitive products that will meet our needs. Now, you know, DCIG has clearly evolved it over the 20 years we've been doing this. But the other thing, too, is like, and our criteria use cases are a little different, but it's still fundamentally the same. In fact, we just use it internally to select a new product internally, and we saved ourselves. We actually drove our cost down one product by actually over 60 percent just by going through this process. Because, again, you don't want to select a product that doesn't have all the features you need, either. Okay. That's just, I mean, then you're better off, because all of a sudden you're handicapping yourself, and you can't do what you need. So, it's very, so, and again, and we don't test the products either. But again, it's sort of like when you're trying to select a product, you want to make sure it has the core features. So, we always encourage you, like, when you look at these top five products, and I put Virgin there, too, make sure it meets your criteria. But then, these are the five, you know, rather than trying to bring in all 30 products, which we considered, we only formally evaluated 19, which meant our conclusion criteria. But these are the five, like, hey, when we look at, you know, if you're a small and medium-sized enterprise, I mean, really, Verge IL should be on your checklist. I mean, you should be bringing it in. If you're a state, local, or educational institution, you know, that's where we recognize Verge in those two areas. They should be on your checklist. I mean, you should bring these guys in and take a look at them. And we've already essentially done the heavy listing for you. All you have to do is just bring them in. So, that's, that's, that was our criteria. So, you don't have to go through all, I mean, that evaluation is complicated. We spent literally months and, you know, hundreds of hours and months doing these evaluations to get to the short list, looking at all the key features that organizations care about. You know what, I, that, my, as I'm listening to you, I didn't want to interrupt you. I literally wanted to say thank you. Not because I work here at Verge, and this is a Verge webinar, but that, that heavy lifting that you did and making the short list for people is, I'm not sure if everyone realizes what a big deal that is. And I certainly appreciate it, you know, because again, I get to talk to all of these people all day, every day. And as a human, which is what I am first, it makes me kind of sad what's happened and how everyone is having, but then on the other hand, hey, to your other point, innovation has now occurred. There wasn't perhaps the impetus for it previously. Now there has been innovation. People are lifting their head up and looking around. So that framework that you developed, and I love that you explained that you use it yourself, not just. I mean, we actually went through the exact same process. And again, there's certain things that will come up as you go through the evaluation process. Like even like, again, we weren't evaluating a virtualization solution in this case, but we actually had like a top two in our case, but one of the providers was responsive and really wanted our business. And, you know, the products were about equal, but there's those intangibles that come into play, you know, that I can't, you know, a top five report, even a number one report can't always capture that, you know, just because they have all the right technical features. Well, you know, again, maybe someone's going to be more responsive. Maybe they really want your business. Maybe they come with a really competitive offer. But, you know, those are intangibles that only you personally can evaluate. So I'm always going to say, well, you know, you got to absolutely choose this one. I mean, that's the reason we came up with the top five report. I mean, these five should be on your shortlist and then let them, you know, compete for your business. And that's, you know, really where, you know, I mean, I could put Verge in the top five, you know, for it to be number one in your environment, that's, you know, that really falls on their shoulders and, you know, their sales team and their, you know, their own internal team to earn your business in that respect. Absolutely. So can you give us a sense of, okay, 425 features. I think some of us might scratch our heads to even figure out what in the world, what are 425 features? Not that we have time to go through all of them, but just the high level, what some of those might've looked like. Yeah. So, you know, so we look at, like, first off, like, well, considering all the operating systems, like all the guest OSs that it can support, okay. And basically we just go through, like, you know, we actually go to VMware, like here's all the, and if you ever look at, you know, VMware's, you know, guest OS list and all their support. I mean, now we don't look at, you know, in detail at every version of Red Hat or Windows, but, you know, the general, like, we look at Red Hat, we look at, you know, the different, you know, the different flavors of Unix. So we look at, you know, sort of the broad ones, you know, Ubuntu and those other ones. So, you know, we look at all those. We look at all the different, maybe like some of the different certification where you have, you know, different hardware certifications or who you have partnerships with. There we go. Like we look at all the different, you know, different ways you deliver support. And again, there's, you know, I think we've got like 15 different things we look at. You'll do the offer knowledge base, email, you know, phone support, you know, web chat, you know, just all these little, very little detailed things. You know, do you even offer on-site support? You know, so we go through like this very, you know, really kind of grand, we try, I mean, we try to find a balance between getting super granular, like, you know, are you getting, you know, Bob on the phone or, you know, Aaron, and we don't get down to that level, but, you know, is there someone available on the phone to call? You know, what hours are they available? How quickly they respond? We look at, you know, where do they have service areas? We look at, you know, and then we start to look at their, some of their technical features. And, you know, what, you know, not only, you know, do you support, you know, software defined networking, do you support software defined storage? How granular do you get in those areas? So again, we're trying to find some balance between catching all the big boxes without getting so far down into the weeds that, you know, some things are more company specific that if you're in the top five, you would expect that, if that makes sense. Okay. All right. Well, thank you for explaining that. And I want to actually just pause for a moment here and just kind of think out loud with all of you that have joined us. Some of you are very, well, some of you are our customers. Some of you are partners who are selling Verge. Some of you may be brand new. So we are talking about being a very viable, certainly worthwhile to check on alternative as you look for maybe an escape hatch, if you will, from VMware by Broadcom. And just to give everyone a quick sense of, you know, we're a single product, a single SKU, a single piece of software that combines the storage management, that combines the hypervisor, that combines, and I'm thinking I'm, this might be stealing some of your thunder, but anyway, combines networking as well, all into a single, what we consider to be a private cloud operating system. But again, the overarching theme of this study, the analysis is who's worthwhile to look at when you're needing an alternative to VMware. So back to that, I just wanted to give a little bit of sense in case someone here is like, who in the world are you guys? What do you even do? That's a little bit more. What we would also like to do, maybe we can have my, maybe we can have my email or a link put in the chat or something. Anyone who is newer here, right, and wants to learn more, I would value an opportunity to get together with you, have you just schedule some time that's convenient for you and really take you through the whole solution. But let's, that was a little commercial, I guess. Let's get back to Jerome and get a sense of what separates or what separated in your analysis, the top five from the other 14 that are not the top five. Yeah. So, you would think that, well, let's say something very, very basic. Like you would think anyone that's trying to compete in the enterprise space would offer 24 by seven by 365 support, one to four hours support times. Yeah. That's not true. Okay. I mean, we found that true among all the top five, but as a former data center engineer, workforce 500, that's like an imperative. It doesn't offer that. I mean, and we actually weigh support very heavily because sometimes even maybe a less than perfect product can be overcome with really good support. Now, again, I'm not trying to imply here that you have an inferior product. But you have to understand what I'm saying. I mean, support means a lot. It's that important. Very important. But that is something common among all the top five. They all offer that. That one hour support time, 24 by seven by 365. Some of the other things we looked like, we talked about the Windows and Linux earlier. Believe it or not, not everyone supports all versions of Windows and Linux. So, they offer like, some of the ones we had thinking like Debian or Alma or Fedora, Oracle Linux. And then on the Windows side, they all support like core versions of like Windows 10 and 11 or maybe only Windows 11 now because Windows 10 is no longer supported. But, you know, that's probably brighter. And then, you know, most current versions of Windows servers. So, they'll offer all the versions. So, again, if you're using really old versions of Windows or maybe like the most current version, there might be a little gap in there where they haven't quite finished supporting like the new one. But, you know, generally you can expect, you know, support for all the modern versions of both Linux and Windows as guest operating systems. One of the other things we noticed too is that, you know, they offer like fleet management. That's become an increasingly important thing because so many people are running distributed data centers in multiple different locations. So, they all offer basically options to, you know, to manage, you know, distributed IT environments. They offer those sort of functionality. Maybe another thing that we've thought about, you know, high availability is becoming more and more important in today's environment. I mean, that's sort of almost implied now with today's VMware hyper-converged private cloud solutions. But, again, there's different degrees. I mean, there's just like failing over from one cluster to another, which falls under the category of high availability, or there's automated load balancing and multi-site DR and doing rolling upgrades. I mean, these are all part of what you would expect of an enterprise solution. In this case, we found all the top five solutions had features like automated load balancing, multi-site DR, rolling upgrades, and even self-healing capabilities. So, you know, some of those core high availability capabilities were important in that as well. And then, you know, we're all here because we're all talking about, you know, what's a VMware alternative? Well, part of a VMware alternative is getting off of VMware and onto the VMware alternative and how to migrate that. Again, we have every single solution out there offers a migration path. But, yeah, but which, you know, but what can you expect? Well, the top five will all give you, you know, basically they'll give you, you know, like agentless migrations, you know, with no OS modifications. They also can do like bulk migration. So you can do a whole bunch of VMs at one time, or you can do, you know, just maybe like a cold migration when the VMs power off. So, you know, so again, they all offer them, but, you know, the top five all gave us, you know, some specific capabilities for organization. Hey, listen, if you buy any one of the top five, require these, you know, these sort of core capabilities are in there and you can expect that. Got it, got it. Now, did you give some thought collectively? Did you give some thought to software-defined networking? Was hardware flexibility? Yeah, yeah. So that, yeah. So when you look at that side of it, there actually wasn't necessarily commonality across all the top five. I mean, you know, Verge OS fall or Verge and Verge OS, Verge IO and Verge OS fall more in the, you know, you guys probably get more flexibility than almost any other provider in the marketplace where you can use, you know, multiple different types of hardware, multiple different type providers. There's one of the top five that they said, you know, I mean, very good solution, but they only want you to, you know, they only support it on the hardware they provide as an infrastructure as a service. So if you want to reuse or repurpose your existing VMware service, you know, I mean, that's just a question you have to ask yourself. Is that important to you or not? If it is that, you know, that, you know, nothing, you know, not against their, they have certain things they're trying to accomplish with their solution that Verge IO is saying, hey, listen, if you need that type of flexibility, in fact, you probably get more flexibility than actually even VMware does to use, you know, less robust hardware than VMware's current requirements. And your licensing standards are certainly not as onerous as what, as VMware is putting on right now. I mean, because even if you have, you know, hardware that VMware will technically run on, you have to license it for, you know, for greater capabilities, whereas you guys give that, you know, just a much more, you know, that per server licensing capability, which is much more digestible for organizations, for lack of a better way of putting it. Absolutely. In fact, for those of you who are newer to us, just to make sure you got a couple of those really important things Jerome just explained. With Verge, how do we license? We license per physical server, not per core. We really, we don't care what your core count is or per RAM or even for the amount of storage that you're managing, that we're managing for you per physical server. Digestible is a good, I thought that was a really great explanatory word because that's the feedback we're getting from our customers. Regarding the hardware, because of how well our development team has abstracted the software from the hardware, we just about don't care what you run us on, just about. And just to be clear, again, we can have a conversation another time about this. I would love to with any of you, but we have a very modest minimum resource requirement. We do have requirements and they have to be met and then we will deliver what we promise. But it gives you a ton more flexibility. We don't deprecate hardware. We don't dictate hardware choices. We just need a modest minimum resource requirement met. So I think most of our customers continue to utilize their existing hardware investment. Plenty put us on brand new gear, but more don't. So thank you for bringing that up as well. So I think, let's see, you mentioned a couple of things. There are even some differentiators amongst the top five. We're not saying, I mean, I guess I would tend to say better or less good. But anyway, we're kind of just saying there's differentiators. Some of those might be what for people to consider? Yeah. So when you look at some of the differentiators, like for instance, they all offer quality of service because, again, when you put multiple VMs in the same cluster, there are some that are going to need a higher priority and access to resources. So again, they all offer quality of services, but how they implement quality of service is going to vary from one to the other. I mean, again, some may offer the features. Some may offer certain variations. Like for instance, like basically monitoring network quality of services. Some of them, they're going to implement a little differently and you may get different feature functionality in each one. How they allocate resources to a workload. They all, you know, some, again, you'll basically have like a maximum threshold. Some offer a minimum. Again, they'll have something in that area, but they may not both offer it the other way. They may not all manage it exactly the same way. Nothing is like achieving a near zero time recovery objective. Again, a few of them offer that. So you have to kind of look, you know, if they offer it, do they offer it in a way that you can easily utilize it? And then there's also a few that even offer like gold, silver, and bronze level of quality of service. So that's going to be one example that organizations want to examine. I've already kind of mentioned, you know, like deployment options. We touched on that a little bit earlier. Do they offer an appliance option to deploy it or do they partner with someone to do that? Or is this strictly software and you're kind of on your own? It's just an infrastructure of the service. So these are sort of the things that, you know, we saw differences in how they do it. I wouldn't say, you know, one's right or wrong, but for organizations who are kind of trying to look at the whole picture, these are important things to consider on that front. Awesome. All right. Well, thank you for that, Jerome. So what I'd like to do now is pause and shift gears a little bit. Bob, what we've promised and we're excited to deliver everyone is have Bob come back. And we'd like to show you, it's brief, you know, but we want to show you the product in action and VMware migration in particular is what we're going to spend a few minutes where Bob's going to kind of talk us through and show us what does this look like? How does it work? Feel free to continue with the questions through his demo, and we'll try to make sure we answer those as well. And Bob, with that, please take it away. You got it. Let me get my screen shared here. Happy introduction to anybody who hasn't seen the Verge OS interface before. This is effectively something like our vCenter web UI. So I'm actually formerly a VMware employee. Worked there for about nine years myself in R&D and professional services across a number of different products, really. But today I'm going to be really showcasing what we can do to directly migrate VMs from a vSphere environment over to Verge. So you'll notice at the top here, got a couple extra tabs. This KVM window is just for in case anybody's curious to see what a given Verge host looks like when you plug the keyboard monitor and mouse up to it. But I've got my old vSphere home lab environment, and I've got my Verge home lab environment right here. So for us, we keep all our VMs in this VM section. Think of it kind of like your hosts and clusters or your VMs and templates view. But everything with regards to migration will go to this import export section and down to VMware services. Now, per vCenter or standalone host, because we can migrate from either one of them. Obviously, if you're running a number of hosts, it's much easier to point to a vCenter server. But you'll have what we call a VMware service assigned to it. So it's a one-to-one relationship of a VMware service to a vCenter or a standalone host. I've got one already up. It's specifically pointed to my vCenter 7 environment. But we do support all the way up to 9.x and all the way back to 5.5. So if you're running some legacy environments, good news. We could probably work with you. Now, that said, with regards to connectivity, all of our migration traffic is initiated from the Verge OS side over to vCenter or the ESXi hosts. There is no traffic that needs to initiate from the VMware side over to us. So to that end, all we need for connectivity is access to TCP ports 443 and 902 on vCenter server and any ESXi hosts that have VMs you would like to migrate. In addition to that, you will notice I am using admin of vSphere.local here. It does not have to be that. We do have pared-down roles you can use. I've just been testing out some things on my end. But once you have this all effectively configured, you will more or less enumerate all VMs in that vSphere environment. So if you take a look at this list of VMs here, this is going to be equivalent to what you're seeing right here in my vSphere Homelab. So we'll keep track of what VMs are on, which ones are off. And then at this point, for anyone that's actually looking to migrate VMs, the next step would be assigning what we call a backup schedule. Now, you can kick off what we call a backup job manually or ad hoc. And I do recommend that to folks, especially when they're first playing around with this just to get a handle as far as what we do and how we work with these migration scenarios. But once that's done, you can have different backup schedules to stagger different sets of VMs for copying their data over. And for each one of these, I'll take this old domain controller I've been messing around with. If I go to backup, a backup schedule will kick off a backup per VM with these options. Now, quiesc snapshots, this is going to be referring to vSphere snapshots. And I'll show you what I mean by that here in a second. But if you have a need of, you know, issuing a quiescing command to stun the file system, collect memory, you know, for a app kind of consistent, you know, copy of that VM, we can. And then with regards to how we get a copy of each VM, it's going to be in one of three ways. A differential is effectively going to pull a full thin copy the very first time we get a copy of a VM. And then differential copies for every subsequent copy where we're utilizing change block tracking or CBT over on the vSphere side. And then as you can imagine, full thick and full thin just means that we're pulling a full copy each time we get a backup. Now, I'm going to kick off just an ad hoc one here. This expiration date refers to the copy of the data that we're pulling for this specific backup job on the vSphere side. So we'll hold on to that for a couple days if you want to, or you can always, you know, choose to have this being far, far out into the future if you'd like. But anywho, I go to submit, and then I hop back into my vSphere environment. You're going to see a couple things happen here. First, we'll take effectively a vSphere snapshot of that VM. And then secondly, we'll do a bunch of port group lookups. So the snapshot, after we take it, we're just copying the data from that snapshot. That's all. The port group lookups, the reason why we're doing those is that if you have a Verge external network that has the same name as a port group in your vSphere environment that VMs NICs are hooked up to, we'll make a note of that to automatically hook up this imported VMs NICs to those same Verge networks. Now, external networks, it's a Verge term, but it's more or less our version of a port group. And we also have something like a distributed virtual switch, or a DDS. We call them Verge physical networks. But these snapshots, the way they are transferred is through NFC. So effectively, depending on the host you're coming from, it'll be whatever VM kernel NIC has the NFC service enabled. In a lot of cases, if you don't have a dedicated one, that usually means it goes to your management VM kernel NIC. Again, if you want to separate out that traffic though, fairly easy to do so. Just create a new VM kernel NIC, assign it that NFC service, and then assign it to an appropriate set of physical NICs if you want to separate that traffic out. If you're familiar with backup solutions like Veeam, Commvault, you've probably run into this before. Now, that said, with regards to these snapshots, I'm a big fan of obviously not keeping vSphere snapshots around for any extended period of time. So we actually do some checks on our end that if a snapshot is taken and we don't get any data from it for a period of about two hours, we'll start sending commands to remove that snapshot. The reason why we do that is that we don't want to be bad citizens in a vSphere environment and leave you folks with a bunch of open snapshots. Nobody wants that. I'm sure if you've been in a situation before with what open snapshots can do, you'll understand. So now, that said, I do have this VM set to backup every day at 10 a.m. So I just got one about maybe an hour before this. So this went fairly quickly. I don't have a huge delta of data, but for demo purposes, this works perfectly. If I hop back on over to my vSphere site and I go back to this specific service and then to my list of backup jobs, here's that manual copy we just did. You can kind of see I have my scheduled one right below it. But if I go into this specific VM, and again, we can do backups of multiple VMs at the same time. We're obviously limited to the amount of concurrent actions or activities going on in a vCenter, which that can be configured. You can up that to, I think by default, it's like four or eight. You can get that up to 10 or 12 if you'd like. And then for us, once it's done, you'll go into that job and you'll go into import VMs. But before I do that, I want to make a point here to mention that we also have the ability to send this copy of a VM back over to vSphere. I also want to make a point to add that we do not power off the VM in vSphere. We do not delete the VM in vSphere. We do leave that up to administrators to do that before a final cutover because we just don't want to be destroying anything for folks. But again, if you end up doing that yourself and you find a need to move things back, we make that really easy for you. But that said, if you're importing into Verge, you'll be going to import VMs. Now from here, if you had more than one that we're copying over, we can do them all at once. But on a per VM basis, there's really three, the four main things you have to really take in consideration when importing into Verge. First is the name of the VM. We'll try to name it based on what it was named in vSphere, but you can name it whatever you want once it's imported. The UUID field refers to the BIOS.UUID value. Now, I don't know if any of you folks are familiar with that, but this is a value that can be keyed off of something of a unique identifier for VMs in a number of different tools or for licensing purposes. We do not mess with that value. We keep it the exact same. So we don't explicitly mess with any kind of ingest software licensing, OS licensing, or any kind of monitoring tools. The tier that we'll keep this data on, tier for us, think of a data store. So we refer to our data stores as Verge vSAN tiers, but again, they work just like data stores. If you want to keep the MAC address that this VM's NICs had on vSphere, go for it. We're totally fine with that. Keep all the ARP tables for your network admins happy. I'm sure they'll be thrilled. And then to streamline things, we'll place all the VMs disk onto a single Verge tier. Again, it's like a data store, but you are more than welcome to move those disks to different tiers or data stores after the fact, whether the VM is running or not. Lastly, the drive interface and NIC interface. This is probably the most important piece of importing a VM. For Linux VMs, this is actually really easy. Nine out of 10 times, you can set this to Vertio SCSI and Vertio for your NIC interface. Vertio is the pair of virtualized set of interfaces and drivers that we prefer. The NIC interface, for instance, is presented as a 10-gig NIC in guest, very similarly to a vmxnet 3. We can emulate a vmxnet 3 or other NICs like an E1000 for compatibility reasons, and actually we'll be doing that here with this Windows VM, because with Windows VMs, unless you pre-install these Vertio drivers, your best bet, based on whatever version of Windows you're running, in this case here, this is an old Server 2012 VM. I'm going to set this to my safest option, which is a generic SATA disk interface and then an Intel E1000. Now, that said, it's only going to be staying on these for the duration of the first boot I have before I install our version of VMware Tools. So I'm going to go ahead and click Submit here, and then once that's done, which honestly will be about 10 seconds from now, we can click on the entry of this VM and go right to this brand new VM itself. You'll notice that this is done being imported. The data was already on Verge. We're just effectively turning it into a VM, much like how you would turn a VM template into a VM in vSphere. It's really just more of a toggle for us. Now, at this point, I'm just going to power this on. We do give you an option of taking a in-Verge snapshot, and I'll get this out of the way too. Verge snapshots are absolutely nothing like vSphere snapshots. They are not Delta disk based, and even though they're not Delta disk based, they come with their own built-in expiration dates, so you don't always keep track of them. But we always recommend taking a snapshot before power on, just so that if you need to go back and change up something with how it's booting or the disk order for its booting, you can do so easily without re-importing. After that, I'm going to bring up its remote console right here. And you'll see this is booting right now. And again, with Windows VMs, because this is a new set of devices for things like the drives and NICs, it's going to be enumerating those and then getting those ready to go for its first boot on Verge. But there are ways of doing things like keeping the IP address of a VM from one platform to another. If you've ever done any type of migrations of Windows VMs before, you're probably very well aware of how a changed NIC usually gets shown as a new device and then loses its IP. There's actually a very handy PowerShell script from Microsoft that can pre-create a scheduled task for you that will automatically configure a net new NIC with the IP address of its old NIC on first boot on a new platform. It was originally designed for things like going from Azure local to Azure cloud, but it works for any other platform, which is really, really nice to have. At this point, I'm going to go ahead and do a control delete. And then hopefully I remember my password here. Hey, look at that. And I'm logged in. Now, again, this being 2012, one of the very first things I'm going to want to do is I'm going to want to insert our version of VMware tools, which for us is just the, you know, virtio set of drivers. So I'm going to insert this one. So with virtio, they have varying different levels of support. So for older OSs like 2012 here, there's sort of a max version of them versus anything. It's like anything 2016 up, you can use the newest versions of virtio. But for this 2012 VM, I'll go on in here, go to virtio win, and I'm going to kick off our install. So again, this all comes from the Fedora project. We actually have some Verge branded ones coming out here soon. And once this gets going, you'll notice a very familiar looking set of drivers here that we'll be installing for things like our balloon driver network, you know, things we want to do like a RAM dump on OS panics, IO, you name it. I'll go next, go to install, get these going. And this includes things like a display driver too. So we have a display driver through Spice that, there it is right there, allows you to get a little bit higher fidelity, higher frame rate for VMs through the console session if you need to, for whatever reason. At this point, if I wanted to swap these over to be virtio, all I would have to do is to shut this down, swap that NIC and any disks there to be, you know, the virtio equivalent and then power it right back on. But again, this is a VM that you just saw live, make a copy from vSphere over to Verge, and I just started up. The only difference really between mine and like a net new copy would be that initial copy is going to be a little bit longer given that we're getting our first copy of it. But our differentials tend to be fairly small depending on the rate of change of the VMs that you're looking to configure. So that said, I'm going to shut this on down. And yeah, our next pretty much step would be just come down here in Verge. We have our drives and NICs enumerated just like you would see them in vSphere where we can go and just change up these interfaces per, you know, disk per, you know, NIC and then move them over to whatever we want them to be, which in our case will be a virtio driver. But that's it. That's all it takes to do, you know, a vSphere to Verge migration. And we bring over things too, like if you had notes in that VM in vSphere, we'll try to bring those over as well. We also, you know, can do things in Verge similarly to vSphere like tags where we even have things like tag categories. So again, yeah, if you're looking for something that's pretty easily, you know, easy to cognitively move your skills from vSphere over to another platform, Verge is fantastic for that. So that said, I'm going to stop sharing here. And I don't know if we can hang out here for some more Q&A, or Aaron, I could pass the ball back over to you. Yeah, thank you, Bob. That was, boy, I got my money's worth. That was a really great demo. Thank you so much. And really, for all of you that are here with us, you know, we've got a few minutes beyond where we thought we were going to go. But it's just so exciting to talk about for us. And I hope getting a sense from Bob of watching it in action, there's just feature-rich is an understatement. Capable is an understatement. But I hope the demo was at least helpful for some of you. I also want to just shout out, Scott, I saw that you were sharing some of your sort of infrastructure success that you've had with us, and really appreciate you and your whole team. I think I saw Jason was here. And, you know, as well as our other customers and partners that are here with us. If there are any other questions, we could still spend a few minutes answering them. But I also want to point out, we have put in the chat a calendar link where you can just schedule some time on my calendar at your leisure. So please grab that if you would like to do so. I did put my email somewhere in there as well, if you have just some general questions that you'd like to get answered, because we can't always get to them all here. Jerome, any sort of further thoughts, closing thoughts before we wrap things up today? Well, I just want to, again, thank you for having me on, you know, join you today for this webinar. For those who are looking at, you know, just for those who are considering VergeIO, again, we looked at the other products in the space. You know, again, just things that kind of stuck out to me when we looked at it is, you know, just the way, you know, what Bob was just illustrating there, just how you can migrate off of VMware into this environment and do it in a, you know, you don't have to get any third-party tools. You can use the tools that come with VergeOS. I mean, that's something that really kind of stuck out to me, and it even gives some ability to, you know, start the migration, continue running VMware, running your own environment, and bring it over. That is, you know, that's a feature that stood out to us as we were looking at some of the products in the environment. And then, you know, just so you can optimize available hardware. I know, you know, so often you have to buy new hardware, or your existing hardware may actually get a boost out of what VergeIO and the way it implements and stack, and how you can get all this. You don't have to buy different pieces and parts and try to manage. That's something that kind of stuck out to us as well as we were evaluating them. I mean, is that reason alone to buy VergeOS? Maybe, maybe not, but it's just something, hey, listen, I mean, I'm not going to get these necessarily with other alternative solutions. So, you know, sort of a tip I have to VergeIO and what you've done in that area to really help be aware of what organizations are facing, that, you know, you've kept your pricing pretty aggressive, you know, really like your per server pricing that you've done on that front as well. So it's, you know, you've just done a really nice job, very thoughtful solution. And it's not just a hypervisor alternative. It's really more a private cloud alternative when you look into VergeIO. Those are things that just really stick out to me about your products, you know, compare that to the other available solutions in the marketplace. Thank you, guys, guys and girls. We super appreciate all of you. Have a great rest of your day, and we'll see you right back here soon for our next webinar. So take care, everyone. Thank you and goodbye.
