Enterprises in Asia continue to shift away from VMware onto Nutanix

Toshiba ditches VMware after 16 years as it plans to migrate to Nutanix while MSIG Asia completes its entire migration onto Nutanix, having been a VMware customer since 2008.

In his keynote address at the .NEXT Conference in Washington D.C., Rajiv Ramaswami, President and CEO at Nutanix stated that Nutanix adds about 700 new customers every quarter, with the majority of them migrating from VMware to the Nutanix Platform.

Given this scenario, Ramaswami added that Nutanix will now be looking to enable a faster migration process on Nutanix Move via Place Migrations, a tool which will be available later this year. To support complex even more complex migrations, he added that Nutanix will also be enabling a more seamless and secured migration that will be automated through Firewall Policies.

Around the world continue, enterprises continue to shift from VMware to Nutanix. In the Asia Pacific region, the situation is also the same with some customers moving at a much faster pace with the help of their local partners.

According to Michael Magura, Vice President, Partner Sales for APJ at Nutanix, enterprises in India were one of the fastest to migrate their workloads when they began to realize the changes coming in from VMware. Magura also mentioned that partners in India were prepared to help customers with their migration.

Migrating to Nutanix

In Japan, Toshiba I.S. Corporation, a VMware customer for 16 years needed to migrate quickly to Nutanix as the Japanese manufacturer wanted to avoid the high renewal costs being charged by VMware. Katsuhiro Nigorikawa, CTO of Toshiba I.S. Corporation said that the renewal costs increased by up to ten times, which led them to consider moving away from VMware.

Nigorikawa added that Toshiba is currently in a POC phase with Nutanix, with migration expected to begin in October 2025. The first phase of the migration will focus on Toshiba’s corporate divisions, involving some 2,200 VMs off VMware to Nutanix and will take between one and two years.

As a new customer to Nutanix, the migration will be supported by Toshiba Digital Solutions Corporation (TDSC), a managed service provider and subsidiary of Toshiba. Interestingly, TDSC is a partner of both Nutanix and VMware in Japan.

Makoto Ochiai, General Manager, Digital Engineering Center at TDSC explained that while VMware still has several big customers in Japan, more customers across industries are moving towards Nutanix after the constant changes being announced by Broadcom on VMware.

As Toshiba looks to begin its migration onto Nutanix, another company, MSIG Asia has completed its migration from VMware. Known for its insurance services in the Asian region, MSIG Asia in Singapore took about six months to fully complete its migration into Nutanix from VMware.

A VMware customer since 2008, MSIG started with VMware ESX3 and was one of the early adopters of virtualization at the very beginning stage. In 2017, MSIG Asia implemented Nutanix as they were looking for a system that can simplify their infrastructure.

“Nutanix was still quite new in Asia at that time. We started small and gave it a try. But we were still using VMware to run on top of the Nutanix AHV. After a few years, we decided to try Nutanix on our own. However, not many companies were still using it. Soon, after the pandemic, we started hearing news about the Broadcom acquisition. We didn’t see it having a big impact at that time. But when we started hearing news about how Broadcom was changing some of pricing, we started to test out migrating non-mission critical cluster from VMware to AHV. And surprisingly, the process and journey were seamless,” explained Kee Yew Wei, VP of Technology at MSIG Asia.

Kee also explained that his team faced minimal challenges working with the AHV system as well as Prism. Hence, they started running on two different hypervisors – one running the full AHV and the other on VMware.

“And then, last year we heard VMware is changing their licensing model. The cost increased a lot by about 300% to 400%. We invited the VMware folks to discuss to see whether we can come to the common ground. We then understood their new models of the license and after reporting all these outcomes to our management, we did not really buy in their explanation. It felt like they were forcing us. So, we immediately accelerated our process of migrate to AHV,” explained Kee.

Prior to the migration, Kee said that his team started working with Nutanix to plan how they wanted to run the migration. After comparing the TCO between VMware and Nutanix, they decided to go ahead with Nutanix and began the migration journey in Q4 last year, migrating about 1000 VMs. Interestingly, Kee added that they were able to complete the migration in early April this year, a couple of weeks earlier than their planned completion of end April.

“We were targeting to complete by end of April because there's a few critical applications, which can only have a minimum downtime, and we need to plan for downtime. But surprisingly, it's quite a seamless process for us, which is a minimum downtime,” said Kee.

At the same time, Kee also mentioned that his peers in the industry are also facing similar situations with VMware. However, most of them are not Nutanix users yet and it may not be an easy migration for them.

“I receive a lot of calls from my peers asking what we are using now. And I tell them we have already prepared early with Nutanix, and our migration was not a problem. I advise them to start planning and do the calculations of their TCOs. In terms of the system performance, stability, scalability, I would say it's at the same power as VMware. However, the biggest factor will be the cost and the seamless integration, especially with Nutanix being customer-centric,” concluded Kee.

Seamless integration and migration

Meanwhile, Singaporean startup Spark Systems is leveraging Nutanix to support its growth in the industry. The FX aggregator needed to ensure all its basics are in order, be it on the infrastructure side, the client support side, as well as on the project management side.

“On the infrastructure side, Nutanix is one of our key strategies going forward. We used a conventional three-tier architecture system before. However, there are a lot of changes in the market going on. There isn't that much certainty about where the conventional players are going to be in the next two or three years or what their strategy might be. Luckily, Spark Systems experimented with Nutanix in 2022 in a small way in our London data center,” said Chaitanya Peddada, Chief Operating Officer at Spark Systems.

Peddada pointed out that when it came time to renew contracts with older vendors, they did a deep dive into Nutanix.

“We started looking at performance, which is critical for us, especially in compute CPU memory usage while using Nutanix as our base VM system. We looked at load testing parameters with Nutanix versus the older vendors. As FX trading is 24 by 7, we only have a window at the weekend to make the transformation or to make the migration into Nutanix. And this is a pretty tough thing to pull off. Throughout my career, I've been through many migrations, but given the support we had, not just directly from Nutanix, but also from the partner vendors, we were able to strategize how to do that. So, over six weekends, we migrated our entire Singapore data center onto the Nutanix platform,” explained Peddada.

Throughout the company, Peddada mentioned that they are still halfway there and are still in the process of fully going onto Nutanix. But in terms of saving on storage hardware, which is a big factor, it also allows them to free up rack space, which means more servers can be added into the data centers. This in turn allows Spark Systems to onboard more customers in a smaller space and give a quicker turnaround time instead of looking out for a new rack and rebuilding the whole new rack.

“From those two points of view, Nutanix sits very well with our strategy. The infrastructure team also found it quite easy to use. And day by day, they're getting more used to it. I think one thing that's really caught their fancy is the one-click migration model. And they keep talking about it. Also, there have been zero incidents after migration to Nutanix and production so far. I guess a key factor is integration, ease of integration is one, but also in terms of how your team adapts to it,” added Peddada.

For Peddada, the only complexities faced were mainly in the planning stage of how they can do it in a short window over the weekend. After trying and testing in demo environments, with support from Sirius, the Nutanix partner Spark Systems is using, they were able to devise a reasonable strategy to take three clients every weekend in production onto the Nutanix platform.