CxO Decision Brief: Modernizing Your VM Environment by Leveraging Diamanti and KubeVirt

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Solution Overview

Modern Virtualization: Diamanti’s integration of KubeVirt in Ultima products provides a modern approach to cost-effectively migrate and run VMs in on-premises and cloud deployments.

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Benefit

Efficiency & Cost Savings: KubeVirt VMs are resource-efficient and high-performing. Diamanti enhances storage and networking, supporting features like VMotion, static endpoints, and high availability, and cutting TCO by up to 70% while improving vCPU scaling.

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Urgency

Shift Now: Traditional hypervisors are costly and complex. Consider the transition to KubeVirt to achieve better efficiency, lower costs, and alignment with digital goals.

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Impact

Transform IT: Modernize IT strategy with KubeVirt. Focus on cloud-native approaches, continuous training, and resource efficiency for cost savings and performance boosts.

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Risk

Adoption Challenges: Transition requires training and expertise. Diamanti’s robust platform and support mitigate risks, ensuring a smooth migration.

1. Solution Value

This GigaOm CxO Decision Brief commissioned by Diamanti.

The virtualization landscape is evolving, with Kubernetes-native technologies like KubeVirt offering a streamlined and efficient alternative to traditional type-1 hypervisors. KubeVirt integrates VM-based workloads into Kubernetes, reducing complexity and overhead while supporting legacy applications without extensive refactoring. Diamanti’s Ultima Accelerator and Ultima Enterprise products provide a high-performance, turn-key platform to facilitate this transition, offering a faster, more cost-effective shift from traditional hypervisors to a Kubernetes-native platform for both on-premises and cloud environments. This makes Diamanti a valuable partner for enterprises looking to modernize their IT infrastructure without leaving behind their VMs.

2. Urgency and Risk

Containerization is proving essential for organizations aiming to reduce costs and increase agility. Traditional hypervisors are becoming less attractive due to rising licensing fees and complexity. Transitioning to KubeVirt-based VMs offers significant financial and operational benefits without needing extensive legacy application refactoring.

This move improves operational efficiency and reduces costs, paving the way for future growth and innovation. Adopting KubeVirt aligns with digital transformation goals, preparing your organization to meet modern challenges and opportunities. Make the strategic shift to KubeVirt now to gain agility and cost savings.

Urgency

Existing hypervisor-based technologies present a growing set of challenges that can expose organizations to increasing cost, complexity, and threat. Among the characteristics that can make a transition away from traditional hypervisors urgent:

  • Reduced innovation and support: The potential decline in product development and customer support quality is a significant concern as traditional hypervisor vendors may prioritize high-margin products over continuous innovation and service enhancements. This can leave your organization with outdated technology and insufficient support, hindering your ability to stay competitive.
  • Vendor lock-in: Increased dependency on traditional hypervisor solutions can severely limit your flexibility. This dependency can make future transitions to alternative solutions more challenging and costly, constraining your organization’s ability to adapt to new technologies and market demands.
  • Operational complexity: Having separate environments for VMs and containers adds to the management complexity during application modernization compared to a Kubernetes-native solution that can run containers and VMs on the same platform.
  • Security and compliance: Traditional type-1 hypervisors, while still current, can present security vulnerabilities and compliance challenges due to their complex architecture. KubeVirt’s modern, streamlined architecture offers significant security and compliance advantages. It enhances the security posture of your virtual machine infrastructure and simplifies the process of maintaining regulatory compliance. However, it’s important to note that while KubeVirt fortifies the underlying infrastructure, the security of the applications running on these VMs remains the organization’s responsibility. By transitioning to KubeVirt, you ensure a more secure and compliant foundation, reducing the risk of breaches and easing regulatory adherence.
  • Economic pressure: In the current economic climate, optimizing costs and improving efficiency are critical. The cost savings from moving to KubeVirt can provide a significant financial advantage.

For executive decision-makers, there is real urgency to move from traditional type-1 hypervisor technologies to KubeVirt within a Kubernetes environment. With the current market dynamics in the space and the fact that the future of applications has shifted to cloud-native microservices, this transition needs to happen. The transition enhances operational efficiency and reduces costs and positions the organization for future growth and innovation. Embracing KubeVirt is a strategic move that aligns with goals around modernizing and prepares the organization to meet the challenges and opportunities of the modern digital landscape.

Risk

We must also consider the risks that come with adoption. While Diamanti alleviates many challenges, organizations with limited internal expertise in managing advanced Kubernetes environments might face adoption hurdles. The intricate nature of container orchestration and persistent storage integration demands a certain level of technical acumen, which could pose a barrier to less mature IT teams. Among the concerns in a transition to KubeVirt-based VMs:

  • Disruption during transition: Migrating from well-established hypervisors to KubeVirt will be a training opportunity for your IT teams in operations. However, the migration tools will have a familiar operating environment to those you have likely used in the past. We recommend testing in a POC environment before going live.
  • Learning curve: IT teams may face a steep learning curve; however, those lessons learned from your DevOps teams can be leveraged to speed up the learning curve, and having a single platform for all your applications is a benefit worth investing in.
  • Compatibility issues: Since this is a virtual machine environment, compatibility issues are expected to be minor; however, check with your vendor support teams to see if there are any changes to support. We also recommend prioritizing those applications that support KubeVirt.
  • Storage integration: Integrating persistent storage in a Kubernetes environment must be considered and carefully planned for data consistency, availability, and performance.
  • Security management: KubeVirt introduces additional layers beyond native Kubernetes that need to be secured, such as the VM layer on top of containers. This will result in a single platform to secure and govern, where before you had at least two. Short-term risk for long-term benefit.

3. Benefits

KubeVirt VMs and traditional virtual machines (VMs) offer different approaches to virtualization, each with its own set of benefits. KubeVirt VMs provide a more lightweight, efficient, and flexible option than hypervisor-based VMs. Diamanti supports running KubeVirt VMs with DKE (Diamanti Kubernetes Distribution) or OpenShift. Here are the key advantages of KubeVirt VMs over traditional VMs and the benefits of KubeVirt VMs facilitated by Diamanti’s solutions.

Efficiency and performance: Diamanti’s KubeVirt integration leverages SRIO-V to plumb the network endpoints and the NVMe block devices based volume to the VMs. This leads to near-native I/O performance and faster startup times than traditional VM technologies.​ Diamanti guarantees over 1 million IOPS per node and granular QoS for storage and networking on its Ultima Accelerator product, enabling more VMs per node than alternate solutions while streamlining both deployment and management processes.

Cost savings: Diamanti’s Ultima Accelerator is an on-premises Kubernetes-native platform that leverages its I/O offload architecture to provide high performance for KubeVirt VMs. It reduces the hardware footprint and lowers license costs when compared to traditional VMs. With Diamanti’s innovations, Europe’s second-largest bank has achieved a vCPU utilization that is four times more CPU efficient than that provided by traditional cloud instances, enabling significant savings in infrastructure costs. The TCO of Kubernetes deployments can shrink by up to 70%, optimizing both capital and operational expenditure​.

Diamanti provides prospective customers access to an online calculator to help them estimate savings.

High availability: Diamanti’s advanced data services protect VMs against node failures. Its hybrid, multicloud DR capabilities allow data replication across these environments to offer high availability and VM portability across these deployments.

Feature parity: Diamanti extends KubeVirt’s base feature set to accelerate the transition. Support for features like multiple network endpoints and multiple persistent storage volumes per VM, IP-address pinning for VMs, live migration, and support for VM pools, among others, makes the transition from type-1 VM solutions to Diamanti easier.

Simplicity and agility: Diamanti’s KubeVirt VM solution simplifies application deployment and management by encapsulating applications and their dependencies. This approach supports modern DevOps practices such as continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD), allowing for more agile development and quicker updates compared to the more complex and slower processes associated with VMs​.

Robust partner ecosystem: Diamanti maintains OEM partnerships with the server vendors, leveraging strong industry relationships to enhance technological integration and support. Likewise, partnerships with managed service providers extend the range and depth of service offerings to enhance customer support and solution customization.

These benefits highlight why Diamanti’s KubeVirt VM offering for on-premises and cloud is becoming the preferred choice for many organizations looking to optimize their IT infrastructure and reduce costs while increasing agility and performance.

4. Best Practices

For a successful transition from VMs to KubeVirt VMs, follow these best practices:

  • Invest in training: Equip IT teams with the necessary skills to manage and optimize KubeVirt VMs. This includes understanding container orchestration tools like Kubernetes.
  • Adopt a phased approach: Begin with non-critical applications to minimize risk and gather insights before broader deployment.
  • Leverage expert support: Utilize K8s certified (CKA) professional and resident engineer services from Diamanti to ensure a smooth transition and integration of container technologies.

5. Organizational Impact

The transition to KubeVirt VMs will significantly impact the organization:

  • IT strategy and operations: Shifting from traditional VMs to KubeVirt VMs enables the modernization of IT strategies, focusing more on cloud-native approaches and container orchestration.
  • Training and development: Continuous education will be essential to keep IT teams up-to-date with the latest container technologies and practices.
  • Resource allocation: Efficiently reallocating resources to leverage container benefits fully, leading to cost savings and improved performance.

People Impact

Transitioning from type-1 hypervisors to KubeVirt VMs may impact the people directly engaged with this technology. IT staff must acquire new skills and undergo training to effectively manage and optimize Kubernetes-native environments. This includes learning container orchestration tools like Kubernetes, understanding container-specific networking and storage solutions, and adapting to new security protocols.

Staffing levels may need to be adjusted as the organization shifts focus. Teams previously dedicated to managing virtual machines might be repurposed or reduced as containerization generally requires fewer resources for management and maintenance. However, there may be an increased demand for DevOps engineers and specialists proficient in container technologies.

Training and skills development will have budget implications, requiring investment in education and possibly certification programs. However, the long-term savings and efficiencies gained through containerization will often offset these costs. By reducing the need for extensive hardware and lowering licensing fees, the organization can achieve significant cost savings, which can be reinvested into further training and development initiatives, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and technological proficiency.

Investment Outlook
Investing in Diamanti’s Kubernetes-native VM solutions involves an initial expenditure on infrastructure upgrades and training. Diamanti offers flexible licensing models based on capacity and service levels and resident service engineers for large enterprises, allowing organizations to scale their investments as needed. Compared to traditional hypervisors, the reduced need for hardware and lower licensing fees contribute to substantial long-term savings. However, it’s essential to account for potential costs associated with the transition phase and ongoing training requirements.

6. Solution Timeline

Organizations can expect the implementation of Diamanti’s Kubernetes-native VM solutions to take place over several weeks. This timeline allows for thorough planning, testing, and deployment, ensuring the integration meets specific performance and operational expectations.

Future Considerations

Over the next three years, Diamanti customers should expect continuous advancements in Kubernetes and container technologies as part of Diamanti’s roadmap. The company plans to enhance its solutions with deeper integration of AI for storage optimization, improved data security measures, and expanded multicloud support. These developments aim to streamline operations further and reduce costs, reflecting Diamanti’s commitment to keeping pace with evolving market demands and emerging IT trends. Enterprises should prepare for these upgrades by planning for seamless integration and scalability, ensuring they can leverage the latest innovations without disruption.

7. Analyst’s Take

The shift to Kubernetes-native VMs represents a strategic move to modernize IT infrastructure amidst rising costs and complexities associated with traditional hypervisors. Diamanti’s container-native solutions offer a robust alternative that enhances performance, reduces costs, and simplifies management. While the transition may seem challenging, Diamanti’s lift-and-shift approach simplifies it, making it a compelling choice for forward-thinking organizations.

8. Report Methodology

This GigaOm CxO Decision Brief analyzes a specific technology and related solution to provide executive decision-makers with the information they need to drive successful IT strategies that align with the business. The report is focused on large impact zones that are often overlooked in technical research, yielding enhanced insight and mitigating risk. We work closely with vendors to identify the value and benefits of specific solutions, and to lay out best practices that enable organizations to drive a successful decision process.

9. About GigaOm

GigaOm provides technical, operational, and business advice for IT’s strategic digital enterprise and business initiatives. Enterprise business leaders, CIOs, and technology organizations partner with GigaOm for practical, actionable, strategic, and visionary advice for modernizing and transforming their business. GigaOm’s advice empowers enterprises to successfully compete in an increasingly complicated business atmosphere that requires a solid understanding of constantly changing customer demands.

GigaOm works directly with enterprises both inside and outside of the IT organization to apply proven research and methodologies designed to avoid pitfalls and roadblocks while balancing risk and innovation. Research methodologies include but are not limited to adoption and benchmarking surveys, use cases, interviews, ROI/TCO, market landscapes, strategic trends, and technical benchmarks. Our analysts possess 20+ years of experience advising a spectrum of clients from early adopters to mainstream enterprises.

GigaOm’s perspective is that of the unbiased enterprise practitioner. Through this perspective, GigaOm connects with engaged and loyal subscribers on a deep and meaningful level.

10. Copyright

© Knowingly, Inc. 2024 "CxO Decision Brief: Modernizing Your VM Environment by Leveraging Diamanti and KubeVirt" is a trademark of Knowingly, Inc. For permission to reproduce this report, please contact sales@gigaom.com.