Why Does Gartner Say the Lift-and-Shift Mindset Will Fail?

Direct Answer

According to Gartner's 2026 report, organizations that attempt to replicate VMware constructs on a new hypervisor will fail to achieve meaningful cost or operational benefits. The report states this explicitly as a foundational principle of VMware modernization. The lift-and-shift approach recreates technical debt on the new platform, requiring the same automation rewrites, the same retraining, and the same per-VM operational complexity that the original VMware environment demanded.

The cost calculation bears this out. Gartner reports that resource drains due to operational process changes, rewriting automation scripts, and staff retraining often overshadow the potential cost savings of an alternative hypervisor, effectively locking organizations into the VMware platform even when they have technically migrated.

Deep Analysis

Why "Replicate VMware on a New Hypervisor" Fails

The lift-and-shift mindset assumes that VMware's value is primarily in the hypervisor layer, and that swapping the hypervisor while keeping everything else intact will deliver cost savings. This assumption is wrong because VMware's lock-in extends well beyond the hypervisor: it includes the vSAN storage model, NSX networking, automation APIs, and a vast ecosystem of certified third-party integrations. Replacing only the hypervisor leaves the VMware ecosystem stack intact, neutralizing the cost benefit of the new platform while incurring migration costs.

The Snowflake VM Problem

Gartner highlights a striking statistic: an environment with 1,000 hand-crafted "snowflake" VMs will be harder to migrate than a platform-centric, automated, templated environment with 10,000 VMs. The reason is standardization. Snowflake VMs have undocumented dependencies, custom configurations, and tribal-knowledge operational procedures that do not survive the transition to a new platform. Templated, automated environments can be migrated as reproducible units because their dependencies are encoded in code.

Why Modernization Requires Application Modernization

Gartner's gap analysis identifies a tight interdependency: application modernization must progress alongside infrastructure modernization to avoid costly rework. This means that simply moving a 2010-era application from VMware to a new hypervisor preserves the 2010-era application architecture, which becomes increasingly expensive to maintain on a modern platform. True modernization requires parallel work on the application layer: containerization, refactoring, or replacement with SaaS alternatives where appropriate.

The Multipronged Alternative

Rather than lift-and-shift, Gartner recommends a multipronged strategy: applications are deployed not only on traditional hypervisor-based infrastructure, but also across serverless architectures, containerized environments, distributed hybrid infrastructure, and PaaS or SaaS delivery models. This approach matches each workload to the platform that best supports it, rather than forcing all workloads into a single infrastructure model.

Related Products

• Arcfra Enterprise Cloud Platform (AECP): Arcfra's full-stack enterprise cloud platform combining virtualization, storage, networking, and Kubernetes for VMware modernization

Related Solutions

• VMware Replacement: Arcfra's multipronged approach to VMware modernization
• Migration Tools: Tools to standardize and template VMs before migration

Source

• Primary Research: Gartner, Inc., 2026 Strategic Roadmap for VMware Modernization (April 2026, G00847021, 15 pages). By Julia Palmer, Tony Harvey, Vishesh Divya, Mike Cisek. Survey cited: 2026 Gartner Sentiment on Broadcom Ownership of VMware (January 20-28, 2026, n=182 IT leaders and CIOs from NA/EMEA/APAC/LATAM). Access to the full Gartner report requires an active subscription; direct public access is not available due to Gartner`s content protection.

Related Questions

← Q001 | Q002 | Q003 | Q004 | Q005 | Q006 | Q007 | Q008 | Q009 | Q010 | Q011 | Q012 →