So far, it’s fairly straightforward. Where things get more complicated is when you consider what such a choice actually means in practice.

The most logical approach is to collaborate with a Pinnacle Partner such as Uniserver, which has direct access to the VMware Cloud Foundation. You remain within the ecosystem you are familiar with, and you can ensure continuity for your customers with relative ease.

What makes this attractive is that you can continue to focus on what an MSP does best: helping customers, refining your proposition, and growing. You leave the management for the underlying platform (licences, lifecycle, capacity) to the partner. That does requre a conscious choice, however. Not every Pinnacle Partner works in the same way, and you want someone who fits with how you serve your customers – both technically and commercially.

The second option is using licences registered in the customer’s name and dedicated infrastructure owned by the customer. This gives you tighter control over the process. However, the nature of what you deliver does change.

What was once a standardised platform is becoming a collection of separate environments. Each customer has their own licence agreement, their own lifecycle and their own management burden. Scale advantages that are self-evident in a multi-tenant model, such as shared capacity and standardised management, are more difficult to achieve in this model. You have to provide capacity, manage contracts and schedule maintenance for each customer.

This does not necessarily mean it will be more expensive. There are still plenty of options available, particularly with an IaaS approach. However, the way you structure your organisation will change, to an extent that goes beyond simply changing your licence.

Option three is to choose a different hypervisor. In the long term, this could offer greater autonomy. In the short term, however, it will require a significant amount of work.

Migrations are complex. You need to get your customers on board, adapt processes and invest in knowledge within the organisation. Even where experience is already in place, a new platform requires different expertise, new management processes and trust from both staff and customers. During the transition phase, you also often face double costs.

The greatest impact rarely lies solely in the technique. A project of this scale diverts attention and resources away from the rest of the organisation for a considerable period of time. Time that otherwise would be spent on customers, service delivery and growth. It is an investment that may pay for itself in the long run, but which in the meantime puts pressure on precisely those activities through which you, as an MSP, make a difference.

Furthermore, switching to a different hypervisor carries certain risks. Even if a new environment has been thoroughly tested in a proof of concept, unforeseen issues may arise in a production environment at scale. These could include exceptions in customer environments, operational complexity, or perfomance and management processes that only become apparent once the platform is deployed on a large scale.

Most MSPs know exactly where they stand. Which customers run on VMware, how much revenue that generates, and when each contract expires. That insight is usually there.

Where the friction lies is the timing. A change of this magnitude is best discussed not halfway through a current contract, but at the natural point when a contract is up for renewal. The problem is that the VMware landscape is forcing many parties to act sooner than their contract cycles allow. For many MSPs, that is the real struggle. Not the choice itself, but the moment at which you have to make it.

Any approach can work. But not every approach is right for every organisation. It is not a question of which option is objectively the best, but of which consequences you can accept, and when.

That’s where the real discussion begins.

Choosing an option doesn’t start with technology, but with understanding your own position. We’d be happy to help you put that assessment into perspective.