VergeIO is looking to shake up the virtual infrastructure market with its approach to virtualization and software-defined networking.
VergeIO is not a startup; the company was founded in 2010 and hasn’t made huge waves in the market. But with the challenges surrounding Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware and rumors of VMware customer defections, VergeIO has emerged as an alternative option.
At the core of VergeIO’s offering is its VergeOS platform, which takes a fundamentally different approach compared to traditional virtual infrastructure solutions like VMware. Rather than cobbling together separate components like a hypervisor, storage and networking, VergeOS integrates all of these functions into a single codebase.
VergeFabric is one of those integrated elements. This week the company announced an update to its VergeFabric technology, adding several advanced networking functionalities beyond basic virtual switching.
“If you look at VMware stack, it’s obviously ESXi, vSAN, NSX, all kind of cobbled together with vCenter,” George Crump, chief marketing officer at VergeIO, told NetworkWorld. “What we did that’s fundamentally different – we’ve integrated all that code into a single, tight, very efficient code base so the networking functions, the storage functions, the hypervisor functions, and if you will, the GUI functions, are all part of the same code.”
What’s inside VergeIO and where it’s deployed
While the ESX hypervisor is at the core of the VMware virtualization platform, VergeIO is based on the open-source KVM hypervisor.
VergeIO is not, however, using an off-the-shelf version of KVM. Rather, it is using what Crump referred to as a heavily modified KVM hypervisor base, with significant proprietary enhancements while still maintaining connections to the open-source community.
VergeIO’s deployment profile is currently 70% on premises and about 30% via bare-metal service providers, with a particularly strong following among cloud service providers that host applications for their customers. The software requires direct hardware access due to its low-level integration with physical resources.
“Since November of 2023, the normal number one customer we’re attracting right now is guys that have had a heart attack when they got their VMware renewal license,” Crump said. “The more of the stack you own, the better our story becomes.”
A 2024 report from Data Center Intelligence Group (DCIG) identified VergeOS as one of the top 5 alternatives to VMware.
“VergeIO starts by installing VergeOS on bare metal servers,” the report stated. “It then brings the servers’ hardware resources under its management, catalogs these resources, and makes them available to VMs. By directly accessing and managing the server’s hardware resources, it optimizes them in ways other hypervisors often cannot.”
Advanced networking features in VergeFabric
VergeFabric is the networking component within the VergeOS ecosystem, providing software-defined networking capabilities as an integrated service rather than as a separate virtual machine or application.
VergeFabric is exclusively available as part of VergeOS and cannot be deployed as a standalone product or integrated with other hypervisors like VMware ESX. The latest VergeFabric release expands beyond basic network virtualization to include a broader set of networking capabilities. Specifically, the enhanced VergeFabric now includes:
- BGP routing: Enabling defined routes between different physical and virtual data centers
- Comprehensive firewall functionality: For access control and security
- DNS services: Integrated directly into the platform
- Security monitoring: Port mirroring for monitoring east-west, north-south traffic for security analysis
- Traffic management: Including rate limiting for better resource control
Multi-tenancy and network segmentation for virtual data centers
One of VergeFabric’s standout features is its approach to multi-tenancy that enables virtual data centers. This capability is particularly valuable for service providers who need to isolate customer environments while sharing physical infrastructure.
“When they onboard the new customer, they’ll use our multi-tenancy, which we call virtual data centers, to essentially coordinate that particular customer off into its own zone,” Crump explained. “It’s still sharing all the same resources, but it’s their own world from that point forward.”
This segmentation happens automatically at the network level. He noted that the moment a virtual data center is created, it’s automatically segmented from others. The platform supports an unlimited number of networks, both internal and external, with granular control over communications.
Looking forward, VergeIO plans to integrate more security capabilities as well as AI into the platform over the next several releases. Crump noted that the threat-detection capabilities in particular will make use of telemetry coming from the hypervisor, network and storage components.
“What we’re really trying to do now is leverage the fact that we have telemetry data on things that are generally separate from each other,” he said.