Leaving VMware starts as a cost decision, but day-two operations decide whether it works

Mouser Electronics is building a production OpenShift Virtualization cluster to move workloads off Broadcom's VMware, according to Ronald Waller, a systems engineer at the electronic components distributor. Waller said Mouser had already run Red Hat's OpenShift for containers for five to six years before beginning the virtualization build. Speaking at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA in a broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's livestreaming studio, he said running containers and virtual machines on one foundation works well because both can be managed with the same tool sets and skill sets.

Waller appeared alongside Jon Owings, assistant vice president of global technical presales, cloud and data services at Portworx by Everpure. Owings said Kubernetes already provides a common control plane for workloads, and that customers were asking for the same thing for their data. Everpure, which rebranded from Pure Storage this year as part of a data-centric pivot, positions Portworx as the abstraction layer for storage that matches Kubernetes.

Rising license costs are pushing enterprise teams to run containers and VMs on a single platform, and moving virtual machines is proving to be only part of the job. A portable data management layer often determines whether a Kubernetes migration succeeds, according to the discussion. Pulling VMs onto Kubernetes extends the common control plane already used for containerized AI workloads to older applications.

Waller said storage was the easy part when he built Mouser's proof-of-concept cluster over the past year, despite a steep learning curve for VMware administrators moving to Kubernetes. He said he asked the storage team what he needed and was handed a user ID and an API key. After configuring his spec for the operator and storage cluster in Portworx Central and creating his secret, he said, Portworx Enterprise handled the rest on the backend without him having to think about it.

Portworx has continued building for that use case, making data management native to OpenShift in May and unveiling new AI and VM capabilities at KubeCon. Owings said teams leaving a legacy hypervisor have a chance to reconsider how they handle day-two operations, on a data management layer that travels across clouds and Kubernetes distributions. He said the moment is an opportunity to change what teams did not like about the previous 15 years, including dependence on a vendor or on shell scripts and PowerShell, and pointed to Kubernetes' open API as a way to be creative.

Portworx sponsored the segment of theCUBE. According to the disclosure, neither Portworx nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.

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