The Best VMware Alternative with Coy – The IT Director’s Podcast

Jay: How’s it going? It is Jay and Michael on the IT Director’s Podcast powered by Clear Winds, and we have our main guy, Coy, here. How are you doing, Coy?

Coy: I’m groovy, man. How are you?

Michael: Groovy. I like it.

Jay: Fantastic. Coy, what is your title? Position? What do you hold at Clear Winds?

Coy: Senior engineer—when I came in, I came in as a senior. Previously, I was a senior engineer and director.

Michael: Yeah. The man introduced himself as being in a groovy mood, so in the tone of groovy, tell us about yourself. 

Coy: Not much to say. I’ve been doing IT and engineering for probably three-quarters of my life. So outside of that, it’s just music and. Family and kids. So that’s me.

Michael: Yes, sir.

Coy: Nutshell.

Jay: Fantastic. Well, look, we’re gonna be talking about hypervisors today with Coy and the different flavors of hypervisor. The different vendors: VMware, Nutanix, and Microsoft. And so Coy, we will go ahead and get started. VMware has been the most industry-standard one over the last 10 or 15 years. So, tell us a little bit about VMware and some of the features and the differences between VMware, Nutanix, and Microsoft.

Coy: Right. So, VMware has always been like the Cadillac. It’s been the gold standard for virtualization. It wasn’t the first to come out, but it took over and became the standard. You had anything from small businesses to, like we were saying a minute ago, Fortune 500 companies. That was what they used. 

Microsoft was always in the background. Microsoft had their hypervisor, which was still a kind of an astute hypervisor, but it didn’t have the ease of use, it didn’t have the patching, and it didn’t have the upgrade paths that VMware had. 

I’ve been using Nutanix for over 10 years. Nutanix, when they came out, they were an all-in-one. They used their hardware, their OS, and their hypervisor. The benefits to that were you needed a package, you bought it, you got it, you plugged it in, and it worked. Support for Nutanix in the past was lacking. Support has gotten considerably better. Nutanix is now doing a hardware-agnostic operating system where you can use Dell, HP, IBM, anything. You don’t have to stick to one. If we’re a Dell shop, they have a list of Dell-supported hardware. Now the downfall to that is you’re limited to the list of their supported hardware, which tends to be the last two generations of what’s come out at this point. The main critical difference between Nutanix and Microsoft and VMware: Nutanix is designed to be a hyper-converge. “Hyper-converge” means your storage is onboard with your host.

Michael: Thank you for breaking that down for people like me.

Coy: Yeah, that’s kind of the simplest way to put it. They are a hyper-converge. That being said, we’ve proven and we’ve designed out and we’ve specked out that you can use it with shared storage, just like you do with VMware.

Now the support for the shared storage is partially there. So Nutanix has worked a deal with Dell. Dell is producing Nutanix hardware. Dell storage is supported. If you have older Dell storage, if you have HP storage, or if you have some of these other storage providers, they’re gonna say it’s not supported. That’s where support and compatibility come into play. Microsoft, if it runs Microsoft Windows, you can pretty much make a Hyper-V out of it, and Hyper-V has to be matching. Would I use Hyper-V on a very large company with a lot of VMs?  Absolutely not.  Can you? Yes. It’s just not preferred. If you get into that size, that’s where you force yourself back into the realm of VMware.

VMware is still the Cadillac; it’s still the gold standard. If you’ve got multiple VMs, I would say 40 and up, I would seriously look at VMware.

 Michael: Well, I’ll even take a step back and see the big picture. So, elephant in the room, everybody’s heard of Broadcom. 

Coy: Oh yeah. 

Michael: Broadcom, VMware. From my seat, from what I’ve seen, we work with a bunch of different companies.

Coy: Right

Michael: They’re all scratching their heads because they’re in a position where this acquisition has happened. There are a lot of people out there that are not in a position to consider using their environment the same way in which they had.

Coy: Correct. Yeah.

Michael: So they’re trying to find alternatives. We’re even having people that we’ve worked with that just financially can’t make that jump. So they’re looking at alternatives, trying to find ways to make it work. We’re hearing people get cease and desist letters from Broadcom, and it’s like, dang. We didn’t see that one coming.

Jay: Coy and I agree, Michael, with what you’re saying about that whole pricing structure. The whole business model has changed a lot for VMware, Broadcom now.

Coy: Right.

Michael: Even resellers

Coy: Well, they’ve cut so many resellers out of the mix. They have their preferred list at this point.

Jay: So I think as a retired IT director for 25 years, I’ve been a VMware guy since the conception, right? 

Coy: Right. 

Jay: I remember getting certified in VMware three or four or whatever it was way back in the day. So we ran VMware with Birmingham, and I had Blade chassis. My license was huge, and then I did a hyperconverged system. It’s exciting because I think that’s where Nutanix has really got a great niche, with the hyper-converged, Coy.

Coy: And the benefit—and I’m gonna say a massive benefit—with Nutanix is Nutanix AOC, which is their version of something like Prism. So in VMware you have vCenter as your centralized unit. You have Prism inside of Nutanix. Nutanix allows for Hyper-V hosts to be brought in. Nutanix host, VMware host. 

You can still bring everything in. If you’re licensed and you have a certain number of licenses for VMware hosts, you can still bring that into a Nutanix cluster. You can still manage it equally. You lose some of your features. You can’t traditionally fail directly over from Nutanix to VMware or Nutanix to Hyper-V, but you can still manage, patch, and move machines between them. You know, Microsoft tends to be the direction most small to medium businesses are heading, and we’ve seen the conversion from VMware to Hyper-V is fairly simple.

If they have something like Veeam, we’ll do a backup and then restore from Veeam straight to Hyper-V. The thing that you’ve gotta watch with Hyper-V is that you can’t just say, “Okay, I’ve got three hosts. I’m going to use these three hosts and go to Hyper-V.” You have to balance out and load out and make sure because of the specs. Something that ran on ESXI well may take more resources because it’s Microsoft.

Jay: Not a Kernel, not a Linux Kernel. 

Coy: It’s not a true Linux Kernel. You’ve got a true Linux Kernel in Nutanix. Everything is based on Ubuntu. That is your core load. 

Jay: Hey, quit, quit saying them cuss words to us. 

Coy: Yeah, yeah. But you know, backup—just as important as your hypervisor is your backup. You look at compatibility. Nutanix just signed a deal with Veeam. Veeam is a preferred backup for Nutanix. Veeam is a preferred backup for VMware and Broadcom, and now HPE’s hypervisor is now preferred, and it’s all built into Veeam now. 

Jay: Coy, you mentioned Veeam, and it’s interesting. I know we’re talking about hypervisors, Michael, but you know, the hypervisor and the backup infrastructure go hand-in-hand. I was a Veeam customer right from the conception. We had Veeam for probably 13 years, and it was super small when I first got it. I love it. It was like Backup for Dummies, you know what I mean? 

Coy: Oh yeah. 

Jay: It’s the best backup software I ever had, and it worked hand-in-hand with VMware. But you said it was really interesting how they have partnered with all the other different hypervisors. But I never could find anything where the Microsoft Hyper-V was- 

Coy: It is part of Veeam. 

Jay: Yeah. 

Coy: I think Veeam is predominantly, if you’re using Hyper-V, your backup solution. Because Microsoft got rid of their backup for a while. They went to Backup Exec, and then it all rolled into Veeam. There are other options, but restoring from Broadcom’s VMware straight to Hyper-V or straight to Nutanix is a benefit for everything. So when we were looking at hypervisors and comparing, does it have Veeam compatibility? What is their primary backup? 

Jay: Veeam’s a great software, Michael. It really is. 

Michael: Well, I keep saying this because, hey, I wasn’t a previous IT director. I’ve been in sales in the IT industry for six years. I don’t have the knowledge base you guys have. But I would network with a lot of different businesses and organizations of all kinds of sizes. Why was VMware so great? 

Coy: VMware was so great. Ease of use. Their product support from, not at the time, Broadcom has changed a lot. It used to be that you had an issue, and if you had a support package and you called, you had an engineer within an hour. There have been times lately we’ve called with a SEV1 issue, and we didn’t have a response for five or six hours. 

Michael: What type of issue?

Coy: Say you had a host down, or say you had a crashed VM. Or you had a storage issue—

Jay: Which could be like catastrophic outages for something.

Coy: I think about some of the places I’ve worked or worked with; if they’re down more than five to 10 minutes, it is a severe issue. Telling somebody they’ve gotta be down for six hours waiting for support.

The benefit Nutanix swears by is that if you have an issue, you have an onshore immediate response. And typically with Nutanix and HPE and some of these others, because they are so new in what they’re doing now, you have an assigned engineer almost, which is great.

Jay: I know you’ve worked with Dell and been a huge partner with Compellant before Compellant was bought by Dell. “Co-pilot.” The co-pilot support. I loved it, man. I got the same guy. 

Coy: You had the same engineer.

Jay: Yeah. 

Coy: Because they worked on that same model. You almost have a regional engineer. Anybody in that region would get that engineer.

Jay: Which is a huge benefit for Nutanix, in my opinion. 

Coy: It is, and that was one of the things that we looked at heavily when we were choosing Nutanix. Something we wanted to work with and focus on was how quick we are getting responses. Do we have direct engineer numbers? Nutanix gives you a direct number to most of the engineers.  You still open a ticket, but you can get an engineer if you need it. 

Jay: From your professional experience, it sounds like what you do at Clear Winds—you don’t really care if it’s HyperV, VMware, or Nutanix, right? It’s the best fit for that customer, right?

Coy: It’s the best fit for the customer that you look at. Because a lot of times their hardware may be new, but their hardware may not be a good fit to leave Broadcom. And Nutanix has a very tight list right now.  It’ll function, but they may not support that hardware.

Michael: That’s an unfortunate thing that I’ve seen: you’ve got some VMware, Broadcom customers, and they’re just not able to—

Coy: Drop in and drop, you know, for a whole new setup. Yeah.

Michael: And so they’re in that spot where they can’t pay for a new setup at this stage, and also they can’t pay three times as much as it was with whatever license type they had. And so what do you do if you’re in that spot? Because I know a lot of our listeners are in that spot trying to understand. 

Jay: That’s a great question, Michael.

Coy: That’s when you sit down and you have to seriously look at: Are you truly sized correctly with your VMs? Are you overcommitted? Do you have too much memory committed to a machine that’s only using 15 to 20% of those resources? You size everything properly, and then you look at your hardware and say, “Can I run what I need to run on the hardware that I have?” 

Michael: In looking at reviews, have you found people that are not sized?

Coy: We have, and we’ve made size adjustments. We’ve reduced memory in some cases and had to increase memory. We have tools that you’ve run. I’m sure most of our people that are watching have run. We have tools that review every aspect of the virtual environment that’s there. It tells you: In the last six months or the last year, how many times does this server hit a threshold? How many times has it never even hit 30 or 40%? And we can look at those numbers and size properly. 

So for Nutanix, Nutanix has a tool. You take that tool, you load it into their designer, and it tells you, “This is how many hosts you truly need.” “This is what you really need to run on it.” We can take that and compare it to what they have and say, “Okay, we can do something with what you’ve got,” or “You’re going to need a new host and new storage.”

Michael: Are you seeing cost savings when you’re taking that approach? 

Coy: We have. I don’t wanna mention any clients, but in the last two weeks we’ve done two conversions for clients, and they’ve both gone smoothly. One of them bought new hardware. They bought new hardware for one location. Recycled hardware for the other. For what you’re doing, you knew you needed new hardware. You knew support was coming up in the next two years. You know you’re gonna be end-of-life anyway. Go ahead and get new hardware. We’ve had other local schools that had hardware that was perfectly adequate. We looked at the support, and we extended support on it. We found out when the end of life on their hardware was gonna be, and we were able to get them another three to four years out of the hardware they had.

Michael: Awesome. 

Coy: Convert ’em to Hyper-V, and they’ve run great.

Jay: I was thinking, Michael, as Coy was talking and you were talking about how you structure them for your customers and the position that a lot of people are in. Michael, like you said, they can’t even afford to buy the license, much less repurpose hardware or buy new hardware. So have you seen customers shift into cloud like AWS and Microsoft?

Coy: We’ve seen some. I know outside of our clients, I know of people that have been going to cloud, but even cloud is starting to increase in price.

It depends on who you’re looking at. If you’re looking at Amazon or if you’re looking at Azure with Microsoft, there are good cloud options. If it was a super small place, if they only had two or three servers, a domain controller, a file server, or something like that, cloud would be perfect if you’re running specific software. We have a lot of clients that are using homegrown software; they’re using specific applications. They’re not really cloud compatible, the way they communicate, the way they work.

Jay: You answered just how I was thinking. Michael, a lot of people get sticker shock, like, “Oh man, I can’t pay 10x” and “I can’t buy $400,000 worth of a new VxRail” or whatever the case may be. And they’re like, “Let’s go to cloud.” Then they go to cloud and the cloud is 10x as well, right? So really, you gotta plan and make those investments. I think, Coy, you have really broken down all the different virtualization platforms, right?

It’s pretty interesting about Nutanix, listening to you talk about a lot of the benefits of Nutanix. HyperV, from what I gathered, is for small environments. I don’t wanna get the blue screen of death on all my servers I’m hosting, you know what I mean?

Coy: Yeah. 

Jay: For VMware it’s been the rock-solid workhorse for years, but with that pricing model, it makes it tough for customers, you know? 

Coy: And talking about compatibility between the three, if we’re just talking about those three. With VMware, you can run macOS, Linux OS, and Windows.

Nutanix can run all three as well. That is one limitation with Microsoft. Microsoft Hyper-V is predominantly a Windows environment. If you’re a customer that has a predominant Windows environment, it’s perfect. You can run Linux, but you’re not gonna have support for Linux. They don’t support a problem you may have. 

Jay: That is a great point, Michael, that Coy just brought up. A real-world scenario with VoIP systems, with Cisco Call Manager. They’re all Linux machines, and they have the templates; you can download their Linux, but they don’t support any of that in Hyper-V, which makes it a little tough.

Coy: It does run, and it runs well. Two of the schools we did are running. One of them is running Ruckus SmartZone, and it’s running a Linux-based phone system. It runs. But truly, they don’t support it.

Jay: So stuff happens, and they’re like, “We’re not helping you.”

Coy: You’re gonna have to figure it out, or we’re gonna have to figure it out. It’s not gonna be something Microsoft can work with us on—and I’m not saying they won’t try, but it’s not a supported product. So you have to look at models like that. If you’re running an 80-90% Microsoft environment, Hyper-V, for a small business, is what you’re probably looking for.

If you’re a major corporation with multiple locations, Broadcom is probably gonna be where you’re gonna wanna stay. Everything you get, you can combine state to state to state under one hyper. Or I’m gonna call it “hypervisor manager.” vCenter is what’s gonna be the safest bet there, especially for patching, pushing, and stuff like that. 

Michael: I think that’s a good overview. 

Jay: It is. I’ll tell you, Michael, I think our listeners and viewers are gonna love this episode because this is such a hot topic right now, and a lot of IT directors, like myself, have only ever used VMware. Ever. We went from rack-mounted servers to VMware. So a lot of people don’t even know where to go and how to navigate, and that’s where they can reach out to Coy. 

Coy: That’s been the biggest fear that people have after we’ve taken them from VMware to Hyper-V. They’ve realized it’s not that different. Things look similar. Things act similarly. You still vMotion the same way. You still make templates the same way. You just don’t get all the bells and whistles.

Michael: I think it’s great to be in a position where you can be a consultant who can help people because it’s clear there’s a problem. There’s been a transition in the market, and I’ve had too many conversations with people where I’m working at Clear Winds, but I can feel their pain. We’ve got nonprofits that we’ve worked with that have been shut down because they can’t afford it. We’ve had colleges, higher ed, and K-12 groups that have all been impacted. I think the key point is you’re not alone. There are people who can help. There are options. It’s an unfortunate thing, but there are paths you can take to make sure that you can keep running.

Jay: You keep running. Well, Coy, thank you so much for coming on the show today. 

Coy: It’s been fun. 

Jay: We gotta have Coy back. Because of his wealth of knowledge, I think we could go into more detail around the virtualization and the backup. We need to do a show about the backup infrastructure tied to virtualization.

Michael: If there are people out there who’ve got questions, you can send us some questions. We can get it to this groovy man who can get those answers for you. 

Jay: Well look, go follow us on social media. Go follow us on X and look us up at clearwinds.net. We are glad that you joined us today. This is Michael and Jay signing off with The IT Director’s Podcast.