Case Study

VMware to Red Hat OpenStack Services on OpenShift: How a Payroll Enterprise Migrated Thousands of VMs with Hystax Acura

Executive Summary

One of the global US market leaders in the payroll business (The Company) recently partnered with Hystax to use Hystax Live Cloud Migration software to seamlessly transfer thousands of VMs over a two-year timeframe. The first phase consisted of 500 VM migrations, and after the successful initial phase, The Company proceeded with 4,500+ VM migrations.

The intention to utilize the Hystax Live Cloud Migration solution and migrate the machines was a pure entrepreneurial and management decision to move from the VMware platform to Red Hat OpenStack Services on OpenShift. One of the reasons is the elimination of vendor lock-in and the use of a flexible and cost-effective OpenStack solution based on Red Hat OpenStack.

Source platform: VMware
Target platform: Red Hat OpenStack Services on OpenShift
Number of VMs: 4,500+

The Goal

The Company was tasked with migrating 4,500 VMs in 2024-25 without experiencing downtime or the loss of critical IT workloads. The primary goal is to migrate Windows VMs, and afterward, The Company will be required to migrate thousands of Linux machines.

A secure, reliable software solution featuring consistent replications and an orchestrated launch was necessary to migrate workloads from such a large number of machines.

The Challenge

In today’s software market, few vendors offer a fully automated live cloud migration solution to Red Hat OSO that eliminates the need for manual process adjustments. So, the initial challenge was finding a company that could automatically migrate thousands of VMs to RHOSO.

Another difficulty the Company has encountered is that several departments must be involved in a cloud migration process, especially for this large enterprise client. Since the engineering team spearheading the migration project doesn’t have access to change firewall or local machine settings, flexible orchestration is needed to ensure everything runs smoothly. The Hystax company, offering the Hystax Acura Cloud Migration product, guarantees high-level visibility and coordination of every migration step into a single touchpoint.

Moreover, the Hystax team was ready to help with configuring things correctly for a migration process because there are many moving parts, like the source cloud, the target cloud, their corresponding operating systems, and finally, our replicating agent deployment, and it is easy to miss a parameter, configuration value, or security permissions. Additionally, on-the-go changes, such as switching to OpenStack 17 from 16 in the middle of the migrations and the fact that we started with machines running on Windows 19 and then started migrations from machines running Windows 11, have caused additional issues.

The Solution

While working with The Company, Hystax has shown itself as a trustworthy software company and a partner with spectacular technical support.

The Hystax support team was available for daily calls for several weeks, providing a dedicated engineer to assist with the project.

Taking into consideration Hystax Acura Cloud Migration software itself, Hystax offered the Company a versatile solution to enable secure, seamless, and rapid cloud migration from VMware to Red Hat OpenStack Services on OpenShift by:

Ensuring full automation with consistent replication, storage-agnostic snapshots, and flexible orchestration capabilities
Launching fully operational business applications on the target Red Hat OpenStack site
Implementing WAN optimization and consistent data deduplication using network traffic compression and proprietary technologies for client-side data
Allowing unlimited test migrations for a fully managed and transparent ongoing cloud migration project
Conducting the final migration or cutover within minutes
A standalone solution that operates solely within the customer’s environment without the connection necessity to Hystax systems

The Result

By utilizing Hystax Acura Cloud Migration, The Company has successfully migrated thousands of machines from VMware to RHOSO. This result allows the Hystax Customer to move forward with other projects and gives them confidence that they have chosen the right solution.

By successfully migrating the machines, our Client is reducing his dependency on VMware and its updated pricing model. The Company doesn’t have to worry about further issues with the migrated VMs since they are now in their ultimate destination.

Also, this successful partnership with Hystax has created a disaster recovery proof of concept. Until Broadcom’s acquisition, companies that used VMware often opted for the VMware DR solution SRM (Site Recovery Manager). When moving to another platform like the OpenShift cloud platform, they need an alternative to SRM. The Hystax Acura Disaster Recovery solution is such an alternative.

About Hystax

Hystax was founded in 2016 by a seasoned team of entrepreneurs and engineers with a mission to address digital transformation challenges by introducing cloud migration, disaster recovery, and cloud backup solutions. Today, Hystax is the solution for PwC, Ives Rocher, Nokia, DHL, Airbus, and other iconic brands for cloud migration, disaster recovery/backup projects, and FinOps adoption.

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