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Case Study

Stabilizing high-frequency VM migrations with Hystax Acura

Executive Summary

A global cybersecurity solutions provider headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area launched an ambitious digital modernization initiative, placing secure cloud migration at the center of its strategy. Operating in a high-pressure environment with tight maintenance windows, the company needed an automated, resilient, and high-performance infrastructure to handle frequent virtual machine (VM) migrations without operational disruption.

As part of this broader transformation, the company’s leadership made a strategic decision to transition from the VMware platform to OpenStack—a move in response to changes in VMware’s licensing model and driven by the desire to eliminate vendor lock-in and adopt a more flexible, open, and cost-effective cloud infrastructure. To support this shift, the organization chose to utilize Hystax Acura, a powerful solution known for its full automation, disaster recovery & backup functionality, as well as enterprise-grade reliability.

By standardizing on Hystax Acura, the company established a scalable and stable foundation for secure, high-frequency VM migrations. This action enabled them to execute migrations on schedule, maintain service continuity, and accelerate their overall digital modernization efforts.

The Goal

While the migration was a one-time project, it was a massive undertaking — involving the relocation of over 10,000 virtual machines and expected to span more than two years.

The scale and complexity of this transition were intensified by internal dynamics: the organization’s departments and business units operated semi-independently, each with distinct priorities, policies, and infrastructure dependencies. Coordinating across multiple internal stakeholders and maintaining operational continuity throughout the migration required a robust and highly automated solution.

Moreover, a secure, reliable software solution capable of performing consistent replication and orchestrating VM launches was critical to successfully migrating workloads at this scale. The company needed to ensure that each wave of migrations could proceed smoothly — without data loss, manual intervention, or extended downtime.

To meet these demands, the company turned to Hystax Acura’s Live Cloud Migration. The initial purchase of 200 licenses quickly expanded to 1,000, then to 2,500, and eventually to an additional 2,500 licenses, with more to follow as migration efforts progressed successfully. Separately, another internal IT team within the organization, unaware of the original deployment, also began using Hystax Acura, starting with 50 licenses and scaling up to over 350.

The primary goal was clear: execute a seamless, high-volume migration from VMware to OpenStack with zero data loss, minimal disruption, and full compliance with tight operational windows — all while supporting departmental autonomy and long-term infrastructure resilience.

The Challenge

Migrating thousands of virtual machines to OpenStack is a complex, resource-intensive process — especially for enterprises operating in tightly controlled environments. At the outset, the company faced several strategic and technical obstacles that made this project particularly demanding.

One of the core challenges was the lack of fully automated, production-grade solutions capable of executing any-to-any cloud migration — particularly to an evolving and technically demanding platform like OpenStack. Most existing tools on the market required manual process adjustments, lacked orchestration capabilities, or didn’t support OpenStack natively. The company needed a vendor that could automatically migrate thousands of VMs without disrupting business continuity — a requirement few solutions could meet.

Compounding this complexity were the frequent and unpredictable upgrades within the OpenStack ecosystem, which posed additional hurdles for migration specialists and IT teams trying to maintain compatibility and stability throughout the project lifecycle. OpenStack’s flexibility was both a strength and a challenge — requiring a migration platform that could adapt to its evolving APIs, architectures, and configurations.

And here, Hystax came to the rescue. With its robust, fully automated Live Cloud Migration technology, Hystax offered native OpenStack support, zero-downtime architecture, and deep experience navigating complex, high-scale migration scenarios — exactly the capabilities the company needed to move forward confidently.

Once initial migration efforts began, performance bottlenecks surfaced within the deployed infrastructure. As migration activity ramped up, the Acura Manager console began exhibiting serious stability issues:

The UI became sluggish and intermittently inaccessible

System crashes occurred during live migration operations
The MariaDB service repeatedly failed due to out-of-memory (OOM) conditions, attempting to allocate over 12 GiB of memory
Physical-to-virtual (P2V) conversions failed amid backend service instability
Failed cloud site deletions left virtual machines blocked in unusable states

Diagnostic tools such as vmstat, iostat, and top pointed to high memory pressure, and Kubernetes logs revealed recurring pod restarts. These problems occurred despite a robust deployment configuration (24 vCPUs, 48 GB RAM, 300 GB disk, Acura version 4.2.2505).

Importantly, these technical challenges were not limitations of the Hystax Acura platform itself, but the result of infrastructure strain and aggressive migration loads. As the scale of migration grew, it became clear that proper scaling, fine-tuned resource allocation, and platform-level optimization were critical to unlocking Acura’s full performance capabilities.

The Solution

To resolve system instability and ensure uninterrupted progress with the migration initiative, the Hystax team responded immediately. A dedicated technical session was held to conduct a deep-dive analysis of the customer’s Acura Manager instance and surrounding infrastructure. The investigation confirmed that memory exhaustion was the primary cause of recurring MariaDB crashes, UI degradation, and backend failures.

A tailored response plan was developed and executed:

Identified system-wide memory exhaustion as the root cause of recurring MariaDB failures

Determined that default memory limits were insufficient for the customer’s high-volume migration workload
Delivered a custom patch, fine-tuned for the company’s infrastructure and usage profile
Adjusted memory allocation settings across Acura services to prevent future OOM (out-of-memory) conditions
Performed targeted cleanup of blocked cloud site records to restore full access to affected VMs

These actions were deployed directly in the customer’s environment — with zero data loss or rollback — enabling immediate resumption of stable migration operations.

Beyond solving infrastructure-level issues, Hystax provided a robust migration solution purpose-built for large-scale enterprise transitions from VMware to OpenStack. Through Hystax Acura Live Cloud Migration, the company benefited from a secure and production-ready migration platform with key features such as:

✅ End-to-end automation with consistent replication, storage-agnostic snapshots, and flexible orchestration workflows

✅ One-click launch of fully operational business applications on the OpenStack target environment

✅ Unlimited test migrations, allowing teams to validate and refine processes without disruption

✅ WAN optimization and deduplication, leveraging network compression and proprietary technologies to ensure bandwidth efficiency and speed

✅ Final cutovers completed within minutes, ensuring minimal downtime and full business continuity

✅ A standalone deployment model, operating entirely within the customer’s environment — with no need to connect to external Hystax systems

Throughout the project, Hystax has proved to be not just a software vendor but a trusted migration partner. A dedicated engineer was assigned to the customer and remained available for daily working sessions over several weeks, ensuring timely guidance, rapid issue resolution, and smooth operational alignment.

The Result

After the custom patch was applied and system configurations were optimized, the company saw an immediate and lasting improvement in infrastructure stability and operational efficiency.

Key technical outcomes included:

⚙️ The Acura Manager UI returned to stable, responsive performance

⚙️ No further MariaDB crashes or Kubernetes pod restarts, even under peak load

⚙️ Scheduled daily VM migrations resumed without disruption

⚙️ Previously blocked virtual machines and cloud site cleanup issues were fully resolved

⚙️ Renewed confidence in Hystax’s collaborative support model, driven by direct, responsive engagement

More importantly, with the help of Hystax Acura Cloud Migration, the company successfully migrated thousands of virtual machines from VMware to OpenStack — a critical milestone in its long-term modernization strategy. The ability to complete these migrations securely and without downtime has enabled the organization to:

✅ Reduce dependency on VMware and its evolving licensing model

✅ Eliminate vendor lock-in by moving workloads to a flexible, cost-efficient OpenStack environment

✅ Free internal resources to move forward confidently with other strategic initiatives

✅ Gain assurance that migrated workloads are now in their final, stable destination, with no need for further rework or correction

Thanks to Hystax’s technical expertise, automation capabilities, and hands-on support, the company avoided costly downtime, met its migration deadlines, and retained complete control and visibility throughout the process.

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 disaster recovery & backup, cloud migration solutions, and a FinOps open-source platform to optimize cloud workloads for performance and cost. Hystax is currently 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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