Building Sustainable Infrastructure across
Bare Metal, Sovereignty, and VMware Alternatives
The need to navigate resource optimization, sovereignty constraints, and the risk of vendor lock-in means companies must now think of their virtualization infrastructure as an architectural decision. The question is no longer just about running virtual machines. It is about building a sustainable platform that can evolve alongside business needs, especially in environments where NVIDIA GPUs are becoming a standard.
Virtualization maximizes resource utilization, isolates environments, and simplifies deployment and application scalability. In contrast, bare metal deployments offer optimal raw performance but less flexibility and more complex management. Thanks to technologies such as NVIDIA vGPU, it is now possible to virtualize and share graphics power across multiple virtual machines, optimizing costly and critical resources for AI, data science, and 3D workloads.
In this context, VMware long represented the obvious choice. However, recent ecosystem changes highlight a reality: when a component becomes central, it can also create lock-in. This is pushing many organizations to reassess their strategy and explore other options to modernize their virtualization foundation.
Virtualization Remains a Core Foundation
Virtualization is primarily about gaining agility. A well-designed virtualized infrastructure enables organizations to:
- Consolidate servers and reduce operating costs
- Standardize environments
- Accelerate deployments
- Improve availability and service continuity
In a context where hardware resources are more expensive and sometimes harder to procure, especially GPUs, optimization and pooling become key objectives.
What Options Exist When Rethinking Your Environment?
Before diving into solutions, it is useful to recall the three main strategic directions.
1) Adopting a proprietary alternative
VMware was long the enterprise virtualization baseline, known for its maturity and rich feature set. Today, solutions like Microsoft Hyper-V or Nutanix are often cited as alternatives. They provide structured frameworks and mature capabilities, but they remain proprietary solutions with licensing models and vendor dependency similar in spirit to VMware.
2) Shifting part of the workload to the public cloud
AWS, Azure, and other providers make it possible to deploy virtualized environments, including GPU-enabled ones. This approach is useful for absorbing peak demand or accelerating projects, but it can become costly over time and may raise sovereignty or compliance concerns.
3) Relying on an open-source approach
This is the fastest-growing approach, as it allows organizations to regain control, avoid lock-in, and build a tailored platform aligned with their constraints. Open-source building blocks are now robust, widely proven, and provide different approaches to virtualization. KVM, Xen, and Proxmox VE are examples of open-source virtualization technologies. Canonical takes a broader approach by enabling organizations to move beyond traditional virtualization toward a modern, flexible, private cloud infrastructure platform, which we explore further below.
In all cases, it is important to note that any virtualization strategy, open-source included, must also account for the growing importance of GPU-enabled workloads.
Focus: GPU Environments and NVIDIA vGPU
AI, 3D, and simulation projects introduce a specific requirement: virtualizing and sharing GPU power. NVIDIA vGPU technology addresses this need by allowing a physical GPU to be divided into multiple profiles usable by different virtual machines. This technology requires a compatible and NVIDIA-certified hypervisor (such as KVM, VMware vSphere, or certain OpenStack distributions), ensuring stability, performance, and support.
This enables GPU pooling while maintaining strong performance levels. Organizations can dynamically allocate graphics resources according to user or application needs, rather than dedicating an entire GPU to a single workload.
Canonical, A Proven Open-Source Alternative
Open source is a highly relevant option for building robust virtualization environments, provided it is properly managed. In enterprise environments, it must be distributed, maintained, and supported. Canonical offers a consistent open-source stack based on Ubuntu, with automation tools and enterprise-grade support.
Canonical provides three KVM-based virtualization solutions:
A lightweight open-source virtualization solution to manage virtual machines and containers, with centralized management, an intuitive interface, and high resource efficiency.
Canonical’s highly scalable, lightweight cloud platform. Ideal for quickly deploying a private cloud on clusters of 3 to 50 nodes with a few simple commands.
Canonical’s highly customizable private cloud, with the latest features, automations, and operational excellence built-in. Designed for larger environments, offering full cloud orchestration and GPU integration capabilities. It enables enterprises to operate with cloud-like agility while maintaining full control of their own infrastructure, without hidden licensing costs.
Building for What Comes Next
Rethinking virtualization is not just about replacing VMware. It is an opportunity to revisit the architecture, strike the right balance between bare metal and virtualization, and build a more sustainable foundation in response to sovereignty, cost, and modernization challenges, especially in environments accelerated by NVIDIA GPUs and optimized with NVIDIA vGPU. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. Everything depends on your context. Let’s build the most suitable approach together.
Rethink your virtualization foundation with PNY
Let’s assess your context and build the right platform together, from bare metal to private cloud, optimized for NVIDIA GPUs.
