Are Containers the Best Path Forward, Post-VMware?

Given the soaring costs of virtualization, 41% of enterprise IT professionals told Pure Storage in the new “The State of Virtualization Report 2025” that they planned to switch to containers. 

But this switch isn’t necessarily easy or straightforward, and it involves many nuances. 

Let’s look at the post-VMware reality of using containers and why the path forward now more commonly runs through Kubernetes. 

The Kubernetes Element

In practice, most organizations are not moving directly from VMware to fully cloud-native containers. Instead, they’re using Kubernetes—and technologies like KubeVirt—to run existing virtual machines inside a Kubernetes environment while modernizing at their own pace. 

“We’ve talked to some larger customers whose renewal virtualization costs have gone from $400 million to $1.5 billion,” says Jon Owings, Global Director of Cloud Native Architecture for Portworx. “Those are scary numbers, so they need to get the apps into places where they can run them for a while. “They’re still VMs,” says Owings, “but they’re running on Kubernetes. That lets organizations standardize on a modern platform without forcing risky, immediate refactoring.”

This approach—often powered by KubeVirt—lets teams preserve application architecture while shifting infrastructure strategy.

Download “The State of Virtualization Report 2025”

Why Containers Are Complicated 

From a technical standpoint, fully cloud-native apps are, well, tricky. Here’s why:

• Compatibility. Security and compliance may dictate that some workloads remain in siloed environments and out of containers. Legacy and self-contained applications will likely need major refactoring into microservices, a potentially massive and costly process. 
• Data management. Containers are supposed to be ephemeral and stateless. Migrating workloads that depend on persistent storage or local databases can entail workarounds and strategies that may degrade performance or require more management.
• Network dependencies. Legacy applications have specific pathways and resource locations embedded in their code. Containers, on the other hand, use dynamic networking, which means migration could require reconfiguration of DNS, network policies, and IP locations.
• Licensing of resources. Legacy applications can have hard-coded dependencies on certain OS libraries or third-party software. Reproducing the same environment with containers can be extremely difficult. Licensing tied to specific hardware IDs or CPUs may be incompatible with the dynamic nature of container-based systems.

The Operational Challenges of Containerization 

• The skills gap. The skills needed to manage container orchestration are in short supply. Organizations lacking in-house DevOps and container security expertise may find their migration timelines held up. 
• New security requirements. Traditional security based on perimeters and firewalls is not suited to dynamic container-based environments. Organizations will need container-specific security practices, like image vulnerability scanning, runtime security, and new network policies for container traffic.
• Observability and monitoring. IT teams will need tools that are designed to observe and monitor dynamic, distributed environments with thousands of containers.  
• Container sprawl. It poses the same problems as cloud sprawl. Since containers can be deployed quickly, they’re often deployed freely, which can lead to chaos without a system of control and policies for creating new containers. 

Related reading: “Modernize with Confidence: How Pure Storage Helps CIOs Bridge VMware to Kubernetes” 

The Organizational Challenges

• Strategy. Adopting containers is an enormous transition that requires input from stakeholders across the organization. It’s essential to have a step-by-step plan to ensure the smoothest rollout. Migration to containers can also provide an opportunity to retire redundant and unnecessary applications and services. 
• Cost containment. While containerization should ultimately reduce costs, new security tools, new skills, and possibly even new hires can be substantial. Containerization can also introduce new patterns in cloud usage, which can cause unexpected cost spikes if not monitored. 
• Cultural change. With containerization often comes a shift to a DevOps IT culture. Some skills will be rewarded, and others may no longer be needed, so the transition demands careful management of human capital. 
• Compliance. Compliance in heavily regulated industries like finance or healthcare often requires maintaining auditable activity logs, which are only possible in containerized environments with specialized tools. Compliance also adds complexity to access controls and data protection.

The Kubernetes-first Reality (and the Portworx Difference)

While containers are often ephemeral, enterprise workloads rarely are. This is where Kubernetes-native storage platforms like Portworx® save the day by providing persistent volumes, snapshots, replication, and disaster recovery for both containers and VMs running in Kubernetes.

Portworx provides Kubernetes-native storage, data protection, and mobility services that allow organizations to:

• Run stateful containers and VMs side by side
• Protect data consistently across clusters
• Migrate workloads incrementally instead of all at once
• Maintain compliance, security, and recoverability

The post-VMware question isn’t really “VMs or containers?”—it’s how to modernize infrastructure without forcing unnecessary risk. For many enterprises, that path runs through Kubernetes, KubeVirt, and data platforms like Portworx that make the transition practical, secure, and reversible.

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State of Virtualization 2025:
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