Platform9 launched the latest release of its Private Cloud Director with AI hardware support and enhanced its vJailbreak migration tool so it can convert entire VMware vSphere clusters in place.
The vJailbreak capabilities can speed up VMware migrations at much lower costs, said Platform9.
Platform9's latest product releases land as VMware's rivals continue to court customers since the acquisition by Broadcom. VMware Explore, a flagship conference for customers Aug. 25 to Aug. 28. Nutanix, which is growing at a rapid clip due, will have more to say on poaching VMware customers when it reports earnings Aug. 27. HPE and Dell have offerings aimed at migrating VMware workloads via alliances and their own technologies.
And in the meantime, AWS continues to leverage AI agents for VMware migrations via AWS Transform.
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Madhura Maskasky, co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Platform9, said in a statement that vJailbreak is designed to address concerns about the cost and complexity of migrations. "We can convert cluster nodes in place while workloads are automatically migrated, keeping services online and minimizing business disruption," said Maskasky.
According to Platform9, VMware migrations on average can take 18- to 48 months to complete with costs ranging from $300 to $3,000 per virtual machine. Platform9 said vJailbreak can now turn weeks into days at one-tenth of the cost. Key points:
- vJailbreak can migrate fleets of the underlying hypervisor hosts using full-stack hypervisor migrations.
- The migration tool works in-place on an existing vSphere cluster.
- Hosts are handled one at a time in rolling fashion.
- The tool take down a host, re-images it as a KVM hypervisor, configures storage and network and brings it up as a Private Cloud Director Cluster.
- Virtual machines are migrated into Private Cloud Director via vJailbreak.
Holger Mueller, an analyst at Constellation Research, said the vJailbreak additions are interesting and notable, but the real cost with VMware migrations are the re-testing. Businesses have to re-test applications that are migrated to gain trust.
The Private Cloud Director updates include:
- The ability to let workloads share AI hardware as customers ramp AI applications.
- Support for both GPU passthrough mode and as vGPUs.
- A Terraform-based app catalog that provides DevOps automation for multi-virtual machine applications.
- Two node high availability cluster support.
