Times, they are a changin’…and Pure Storage is here to help.
For years, VMware has been the gold-standard in enterprise virtualization—trusted, feature-rich, and deeply embedded across industries. But times are changing. Following the recent Broadcom acquisition, a wave of dramatic and unsettling has swept through the VMware ecosystem:
- Significant licensing changes impating IT budgets
- Deprecation of popular features like vVols
- Severing of key partner relationships
- Elimination of critical product lines
These rapid transformations have triggered anxiety and frustration for many organizations—and sparked urgent questions about the future of VMware itself.
Rethinking Proprietary Lock-In
In today’s fast-moving, cost-conscious world, enterprises can’t afford to stay tethered to platforms that feel increasingly unpredictable or restrictive. The search for greater flexibility, transparency, and long-term value is leading many IT leaders to reconsider their infrastructure choices.
That’s where OpenStack comes in. As the most mature, powerful, and community-driven open-source virtualization platform, OpenStack offers freedom, innovation, and control—without the proprietary strings attached.
The Migration Challenge
Migrating to OpenStack isn’t just about switching hypervisors—it involves:
- Re-skilling IT teams
- Rearchitecting automation and tooling
- Migrating workloads, including converting virtual machine disk formats and boot volumes
This complexity often requires engaging third-party migration services or leveraging open-source tools designed to bridge the gap. But what if you could simplify at least one big part of the migration—the storage?
A Simpler Path with Pure Storage
Many enterprises already run VMware on Pure Storage FlashArrays. If you’re one of them, you’re in luck.
The newly released OpenStack 2025.1 “Epoxy” includes an updated Pure Storage Cinder driver that introduces support for FlashArray volume groups. While originally designed to provide application-level and tenant-specific QoS, this feature opens the door to much simpler migration scenarios from VMware to OpenStack.
Understanding the FlashArray + vVols Connection
Here’s the key insight: In Pure Storage’s implementation of VMware vVols, each vVol is actually a volume inside a FlashArray volume group. This means your virtual machines’ storage is already granular, well-organized, and natively addressable.
With OpenStack now able to understand and consume these volume groups, it becomes far easier to:
- Identify VM data on the FlashArray
- Import them into OpenStack with zero conversions
- Maintain data integrity and minimize downtime
No file conversions. No complicated exports. Just smart reuse of the storage structure you already have.
What’s Next?
In an upcoming post, I’ll walk through the technical steps of migrating your vVol-based VMware environment to OpenStack using FlashArray.
Spoiler: it’s a lot simpler than you might think.
Whether you’re facing licensing fatigue, worried about VMware’s direction, or simply planning for a more open, agile future, know this:
Pure Storage is here to support you—confidently, intelligently, and every step of the way.
