A detailed piece in The Register suggests that the VMware exit — the wave of organizations moving from vSphere to alternative hypervisors such as KVM-based platforms — is a rare chance to improve datacenter protection. The current division of labor, where production handles workloads and a separate backup tier manages everything from drive failure to disaster recovery, is a legacy of older architectures. That approach multiplies costs and complexity when a site failure occurs, requiring coordination across multiple products and consoles.
The analysis argues that modern virtualization platforms, which unify compute, storage, networking and protection in a single codebase, can take on tasks like snapshot rollback and replication. This would leave the backup application free to focus on migration, long-term retention, compliance archives, and air-gapped or offsite copies.
It notes that backup vendors have already matured their support for the new platforms. Veeam Backup & Replication is given as an example of a product that now supports the VergeOS platform, allowing teams to restore vSphere backups directly onto a new environment and cut over on their own schedule. This turns the existing backup investment into the vehicle for migration.
The article acknowledges that most teams currently plan to replicate their backup design on the new hypervisor without changes, but urges them to see the exit as an opportunity to redesign for higher resiliency and faster recovery.