By Don Boxley, CEO and Co-Founder, DH2i (www.dh2i.com)
VMware has earned its place in the data center. For years, it’s helped organizations bring structure, reliability, and scale to environments that needed it. That foundation matters.
But the world around it has changed.
Infrastructure today isn’t one place, one platform, or one decision made every five years. It’s hybrid. It’s multi-cloud. It’s evolving constantly. And because of that, more organizations are starting to look at their options a little differently. Not because VMware stopped working, but because the business needs more flexibility than it used to.
The real question isn’t “what replaces VMware?” It’s “how do we move forward without disrupting everything we’ve already built?”
Why Organizations Are Taking a Fresh Look
IT environments today don’t sit still. They stretch across clouds, data centers, and edge locations, and that shift is starting to expose some pressure points. Costs that are harder to predict. Less flexibility in where and how workloads run. A growing expectation to modernize faster than ever. And a need for more control, not less.
VMware still plays a role. It will for a long time, in many environments. But it’s no longer the only path forward. And in some cases, it’s not the most flexible one.
The Real Challenge Isn’t the Destination. It’s the Journey
Choosing an alternative platform is actually the easy part. There are plenty of solid options out there, whether it’s Hyper-V, KVM, or public cloud. Where things get complicated is in the move itself.
Migration has traditionally meant rebuilding virtual machines, reconfiguring applications, planning downtime, and managing risk at every step. That’s a heavy lift… And for a lot of organizations, that’s where progress slows down or stops altogether.
A More Practical Way to Think About Migration
What’s starting to change is where the focus sits. More organizations are stepping back and asking a simpler question, instead of anchoring everything to infrastructure: what actually needs to move? Things start to open up, when you center on the application, not the platform.
Workloads can move between environments without forcing major changes, by decoupling applications from the underlying OS and infrastructure. That means running across different hypervisors. Moving into the cloud more easily. And adapting as needs evolve without starting from scratch each time. It’s a quieter shift, but it changes a lot.
What Modern Migration Should Feel Like
If you’re doing this right, migration shouldn’t feel like a disruption event. And let’s face it, in the past there were (and still are) vendors that claimed they could do it – but couldn’t really pull it off… Today, it can feel like a controlled transition. Workloads stay online. Applications move as they are. Windows and Linux operate side by side without friction. Infrastructure becomes simpler, not more complex.
And you’re not locked into a one-time move. You have the flexibility to adjust over time. That’s the bar organizations are starting to expect.
Once you remove the friction from moving workloads, your options expand quickly. Cloud becomes easier to leverage when it actually makes sense. Alternative hypervisors become viable for cost optimization. Bare metal becomes an option for performance-sensitive workloads. Hybrid stops being a compromise and starts being a strategy.
At that point, it’s not about replacing VMware. It’s about giving yourself room to operate.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Organizations that take this approach are seeing some very real, very practical outcomes. They’re moving critical workloads without downtime. They’re reducing costs without sacrificing performance. They’re shifting workloads based on business needs, not technical constraints. And they’re simplifying disaster recovery in the process. It’s not theoretical. It shows up in day-to-day operations.
This shift isn’t about reacting to a single change in the market. It’s about recognizing where infrastructure is heading. Flexibility isn’t optional anymore. Mobility isn’t a nice-to-have. And the ability to move applications without disruption is becoming a core capability. Organizations that lean into that are putting themselves in a much stronger position for whatever comes next.
VMware helped define an era of enterprise IT. That is not going away.
But the next phase is about removing constraints versus committing to a single platform. The entire conversation changes, when you can move workloads freely, without tearing things apart to do it. And when that happens, migration stops being a challenge… and starts becoming an advantage.
Guest Post: Modern Infrastructure Has OutgrownStatic Credentials
Posted in Commentary with tags DH2i on June 18, 2026 by itnerdBy Don Boxley, CEO and Co-Founder, DH2i (www.dh2i.com)
You may have noted that “World Password Day” was celebrated in May… And like each year, there was quite a bit of conversation around the idea that passwords just aren’t cutting it anymore… But, here’s the thing… Passwords didn’t suddenly become weak. The bigger problem is that modern infrastructure evolved far faster than the old trust models designed to protect it. This brought up another related conversation – lots of previously tried and true data and infrastructure security methods also aren’t cutting it anymore – like VPNs.
And, that makes sense. Infrastructure was far more centralized and predictable 10-15 years ago. Even 5 years ago, for that matter. But today, businesses operate in environments that are constantly moving, scaling, and changing. Yet many organizations are still using assumptions built for a much smaller, slower, and more contained era of IT to secure today’s IT reality.
The Perimeter Barely Exists Anymore
Most organizations no longer operate inside a clearly defined perimeter. Infrastructure is spread across hybrid cloud environments, multiple public cloud providers, Kubernetes clusters, remote users, AI workloads, edge deployments, and legacy systems that businesses still depend on every day. Modern infrastructure has become a patchwork of environments connected by operational necessity rather than standardization.
That creates a very different set of challenges than traditional security models were built for.
Static credentials and broad network trust assumptions simply do not scale cleanly in environments where applications move dynamically, workloads scale automatically, and systems constantly communicate across regions, providers, and platforms.
Today’s infrastructure environments often include:
Credential Problems Now Create Operational Problems
For sure, today’s environments are highly distributed and interconnected. Constantly authenticating and communicating with each other behind the scenes are applications, databases, cloud services, Kubernetes clusters, AI workloads, and failover systems.
So when credentials or trust relationships fail, operational problems can happen too, such as:
In other words, a credential issue today can create both a security problem and an availability problem. In modern distributed environments, when trust breaks, operations break too.
If authentication fails, applications can lose connectivity.
If trust relationships break during failover, recovery processes may not behave the way teams expect.
If dependencies are poorly understood, outages become significantly harder to resolve under pressure.
Security and operational continuity are now deeply interconnected, in highly distributed environments.
Downtime is no longer just inconvenient, as businesses rely more heavily on real-time applications, customer-facing systems, and AI-driven services. That reality becomes even more serious, directly impacting operations, customer experiences, and revenue.
Complexity Quietly Becomes the Biggest Risk
Simply managing overwhelming operational complexity is one of the biggest challenges modern IT teams face today. Every additional VPN dependency, networking exception, manual authentication workflow, or infrastructure-specific access policy adds another layer of fragility into the environment.
Eventually environments become so interconnected and complicated that nobody fully understands every dependency anymore. That’s when small problems start cascading into much larger operational incidents.
Common failure points now include:
None of this happens because IT teams are careless, or not paying attention.
Most organizations are simply trying to balance performance, uptime, security, compliance, cost, scalability, and operational flexibility… all at the same time. Of course, that is easier said than done.
AI Infrastructure Is Accelerating Everything
AI environments amplify nearly every infrastructure challenge organizations already struggle with today. Massive GPU clusters, distributed compute environments, real-time responsiveness, high concurrency demands, and cross-region orchestration all place enormous pressure on connectivity, resiliency, and trust models.
In AI environments especially, weak trust relationships and brittle access models stop being theoretical security concerns very quickly. They become operational liabilities. Because failures impact real-time interactions immediately, customer-facing AI systems often cannot tolerate downtime, latency spikes, or connectivity instability.
That changes the stakes considerably compared to traditional enterprise systems where outages may have created delays or inconvenience but not necessarily immediate business disruption.
Why Zero Trust Continues to Gain Momentum
Modern infrastructure has become too distributed, too interconnected, and too dynamic for organizations to continue assuming that network presence alone should imply trust. Resultantly, the core principles of Zero Trust have become incredibly important for organizations to adopt into their architectures.
Organizations are increasingly shifting toward systems that only establish secure connections to the specific resources they actually need – i.e., a move to identity-aware, tightly scoped connectivity models.
That shift increasingly includes:
Because most businesses no longer operate in a single homogeneous environment, the infrastructure-agnostic piece matters enormously. Different workloads require different environments for performance, economics, compliance, sovereignty, or resiliency reasons.
Security strategies now have to function consistently across all of them.
Modern Infrastructure Requires a New Trust Model
Passwords still matter. MFA still matters. Good credential hygiene still matters. None of that is going away, not anytime soon anyway.
Static credentials, VPNs, and broad network trust, modern infrastructure has clearly outgrown the idea that they should remain the primary foundation for security and operational continuity. Today’s environments are simply too dynamic, distributed, and interconnected for those older assumptions to keep scaling effectively.
That’s why more organizations are starting to move toward software-defined perimeter (SDP) approaches built around identity-aware, direct encrypted connectivity instead of exposing broad portions of the network itself. Instead of placing users and systems “on the network” and hoping policies contain access appropriately, the goal becomes far more precise: securely connect users, applications, workloads, databases, and services only to the exact resources they need access to. Nothing more.
That becomes especially important in environments spanning:
The organizations adapting most successfully are increasingly recognizing that modern infrastructure requires a far more identity-aware, tightly controlled, infrastructure-agnostic, and operationally flexible approach to trust than the industry relied on twenty years ago.
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