Migrating Indonesia's Largest Telecom Operator to Red Hat OpenStack Platform
How i3 used Hystax Acura to move 450+ production VMs off its existing virtualization platform
for one of Indonesia’s largest mobile telecommunications operators — agentlessly, in batches of 10–20
PARTNER
i3 (Inovasi Informatika Indonesia) — enterprise cloud & RHOSP solutions provider
END CUSTOMER
One of Indonesia's largest mobile telecom operators (name withheld under NDA)
SOLUTION
Hystax Acura — migration, disaster recovery and backup from one console
INDUSTRY · REGION
Telecommunications · Indonesia
SOURCE → TARGET
Existing platform → Red Hat OpenStack Platform (RHOSP), multi-cluster
SCALE
450+ VMs migrated in batches of 10–20 — thousands next
Business Challenge
The migration was driven by the customer’s cloud modernization initiative. The company wanted to move away from its existing virtualization platform to reduce licensing costs, improve scalability, and build a more flexible cloud infrastructure — as part of a broader infrastructure refresh and long-term cloud transformation strategy.
Without this migration, the customer would have faced significantly higher virtualization licensing costs, limited flexibility for future infrastructure expansion, and slower adoption of cloud-native technologies — all of which could have impacted operational efficiency and long-term business growth.
Why Hystax Acura
i3 researched several migration tools before selecting Hystax Acura. Its agentless architecture, live migration, and incremental data replication stood out during evaluation — together with native compatibility with Red Hat OpenStack Platform, making it the right fit for this complex, multi-cluster project.
Agentless migration with live replication and native Red Hat OpenStack Platform compatibility — built for large-scale, multi-cluster environments.
The Hystax Acura Solution
Hystax Acura’s agentless architecture, live migration, and incremental data replication were decisive factors in i3’s evaluation. Manual migration would have required extensive planning, validation, and coordination, with a much higher risk of downtime — Hystax Acura automated replication and provided a predictable, reliable cutover process instead.
There was a short learning curve when i3 first adopted Hystax Acura, mainly to understand the migration workflow and best practices. Once the team gained hands-on experience, the tool became straightforward to use — with the Hystax support team on hand to help whenever questions came up.
The project used all three of Hystax Acura’s capabilities together — migration, disaster recovery and backup — which i3 implemented for this customer as a single engagement, drawing on its own expertise as a long-established Indonesian IT solutions provider.
“Hystax Acura is an exceptional tool for complex OpenStack migrations; its robust live-migration and incremental syncing capabilities allowed us to execute around 450++ VM multi-cluster project with absolute confidence and minimal downtime.”
Ach. Chusnul Chikam
Associate Consultant Manager · i3
Native Red Hat OpenStack support — the decisive factor
Agentless — nothing installed in guest VMs
Automated replication — no manual copying
Predictable cutover — less downtime and risk
Structured, Predictable Migration
i3 approached the migration with a highly structured plan covering planning, replication, and execution phases, grouping VMs into batches of 10 to 20 for replication.
Hystax Acura replicated the production VMs from the existing platform into multiple Red Hat OpenStack Platform clusters without installing anything inside the guest machines. Nothing changed in the running environment: each batch synced in the background, and the systems stayed live until their cutover.
Placement rules survived the move
Hystax Acura’s Expert Mode JSON exposes OpenStack Server Group and Availability Zone as migration parameters, so anti-affinity and zone assignments arrived on RHOSP intact — batch after batch, at any volume.
Results & Impact
Significant time efficiency
Incremental replication synced data in the background with minimal impact on production, so the final maintenance window shrank to a short, planned cutover.
Full visibility & control
A structured planning–replication–execution model kept every batch measurable and predictable, with clear status for each VM before its cutover.
Proven, repeatable batch model
Grouping 10–20 VMs per replication batch created a framework that scales without redesign, ready for future migrations of several thousand VMs.
Strong technical partnership
Hystax engineers provided hands-on remote support throughout, resolving edge cases such as post-migration VM boot errors within the same working day.
Capability built in-house
After the first few batches i3 ran planning, replication and cutover end to end without vendor hand-holding — the workflow is now part of its standard delivery playbook.
One console after the move
Migration, disaster recovery and backup share a single console, so no second product had to be licensed, learned or integrated — protection was live from day one.
Looking Ahead
Having proven the batch-by-batch model at a 450+ VM scale, i3 is preparing to apply the same framework to a major new opportunity — a large-scale migration for one of Indonesia’s largest cloud and hosting providers, an engagement that would set a new benchmark for its enterprise-scale delivery capabilities.
That next phase is planned for next year at several thousand VMs, and its schedule is calculable rather than hopeful — Hystax Acura’s replication figures let i3 project transfer times and plan each wave around real maintenance windows.
🔷 Assess
Inventory and group VMs into batches
🔷 Replicate
Agentless, incremental, production stays live
🔷 Cut over & validate
Short window, placement rules preserved
🔷 Repeat at scale
Same playbook, thousands of VMs next