If you are weighing up a VMware migration in Ireland, the chances are you have just seen a renewal quote that no longer makes sense. Following Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware and the shift to subscription-only bundled licensing, costs have increased significantly for organisations of all sizes, and many IT leaders are now working out what a realistic path away from full VMware dependency actually looks like.
This post covers three practical strategies Irish IT teams are using right now to reduce their VMware footprint and bring infrastructure costs back under control, without taking on unnecessary risk in the process.
If you have not read our first post on why VMware costs have increased and what has changed, that is a useful starting point before reading on.
Strategy 1: Right-size your resource allocation
Overprovisioning is one of the most common and most overlooked drivers of unnecessary virtualisation cost. IT teams typically allocate CPU and memory generously to avoid performance issues, which is understandable, but in many environments that caution has compounded into significant waste.
The areas worth reviewing are VMs where allocated CPU is substantially higher than actual usage, memory reservations that consistently go unutilised, and hosts running below 40% load, which usually indicates poor density or underuse.
Tools such as HPE CloudPhysics allow you to visualise resource peaks and sizing anomalies across your environment with a level of granularity that makes right-sizing decisions straightforward rather than speculative. The benefits are tangible: host consolidation reduces the number of servers you are running, which lowers support and licensing costs. It can also push out or eliminate the need for additional VMware licence packs. For organisations with sustainability reporting obligations, reducing server footprint also contributes to carbon reduction targets.
Strategy 2: Migrate gradually, not all at once
The prospect of a VMware migration is understandably uncomfortable for many IT leaders. The concern about what happens if something goes wrong is legitimate, and the instinct to stay with a familiar platform, even one whose costs have increased sharply, is not irrational.
The answer is not to treat migration as a binary choice. Most IT teams making progress on this are taking a phased approach: identifying workloads that can move without disruption, running them on a lower-cost platform, evaluating the results, and expanding from there. The most sensitive production systems stay where they are while the exercise builds both confidence and evidence.
The workloads best suited to early migration tend to share a few characteristics: they are cost-sensitive rather than business-critical, non-customer facing, and underpinned by stable usage patterns. Internal dev and test environments, DR and backup targets, departmental file and print servers, and batch processing or archival workloads typically fit this profile well.
HPE VM Essentials, powered by Morpheus, is worth examining for this. It provides a unified orchestration layer that allows VMware, KVM and bare-metal workloads to run from a single control pane, with automated provisioning, scaling and lifecycle management across mixed environments. That means you can shift workloads to where they make economic sense without losing visibility, audit control or security, and without committing to a full VMware migration from the outset.
Strategy 3: Retire orphaned and underused virtual machines
Most virtual environments accumulate what practitioners call zombie VMs over time: forgotten dev and test instances, obsolete applications, proof-of-concept systems and workloads that no longer serve an active purpose. In a per-socket licensing world, these were a nuisance. In a per-core or per-VM model, they are a direct cost multiplier.
Identifying them is straightforward with the right tooling. HPE CloudPhysics provides visual analysis of idle and oversized machines across your environment. A useful practical step alongside this is tagging and grouping VMs by application owner or function. That makes conversations about retirement or consolidation significantly easier, particularly when you need to engage other teams about workloads they nominally own.
For organisations looking to reduce storage footprint at the same time, a modern modular storage array such as HPE Alletra MP 10000 can increase effective storage capacity through deduplication and compression, reducing the overall infrastructure footprint alongside the virtual machine count.
Starting your VMware migration on solid ground
Each of these three strategies delivers meaningful cost reductions without requiring a disruptive or high-risk migration programme:
- Right-sizing reduces unnecessary capacity spend.
- Phased migration moves lower-risk workloads to more cost-effective platforms on a timeline you control.
- Retiring orphaned VMs removes costs that are delivering no value at all.
The window for acting is narrower than it might seem. Renewal cycles can lock you into another year of inflated spend before you have had the chance to properly evaluate your options.
Datapac works with Irish organisations on VMware migration planning and infrastructure optimisation. If you would like to talk through your current environment and what a phased approach might look like, get in touch at info@datapac.com or call 01 426 3555.