A pioneer from practice
The Swiss National Supercomputing Center (CSCS) already relied on SUSE before the changes at VMware and is therefore further ahead than many others. The organization began evaluating alternatives back in 2021 and today operates 60 Kubernetes clusters and 400 virtual machines on SUSE infrastructure.
“When we saw the license changes, we thought: lucky,” reports system engineer Dino Conciatore. “We never liked closed systems anyway.”
CSCS Associate Director Maria Grazia Giuffreda explained at SUSEcon that the move freed up significant capacity. “Thanks to SUSE Virtualization, we were able to reduce the effort required to manage the infrastructure by 70 percent,” she reported. “In this way, highly qualified engineers gain time for new challenges instead of dealing with routine and unexciting tasks.”
However, Conciatore emphasized that CSCS has not completely given up on VMware. “We’re not getting out completely,” he said. “The crucial thing is that we have stopped expanding VMware in recent years and have started to use alternatives.”
See the bigger picture
For companies still evaluating their options, Nadkarni says the decision depends primarily on how deeply embedded they are in the VMware ecosystem. “It’s not just about VMware itself, but about the entire environment of tools that are associated with the way VMware works. That’s exactly what Broadcom is taking advantage of.”
The CSCS had an advantage here, reports Conciatore: “Its automation treated physical and virtual machines equally, which made decoupling easier. However, not all companies have this flexibility.”
SUSE positions itself as a VMware alternative because it offers a working solution, he states. “It is particularly important for us at the moment not to be tied to one provider.” (mb)
