VMware Migration - The migration is just the beginning

This blog is part of our VMware Migration series, we recommend reading the rest of the posts in the series:

• VMware Migration - The migration is just the beginning
• VMware Migration - Unpacking the technologies
• VMware Migration - Technical Demos & Outcome Based Pilots

VMware Migration

Welcome to a recap of episode one of our “VMware Migration” series, where we explore the evolving landscape of IT infrastructure, moving from a VMWare centric world to a Cloud Native hosted Virtualisation future.

Why move from VMs?

The recent acquisition of VMware by Broadcom and the subsequent increase in costs have left many in the industry feeling alienated and concerned. However, as discussed in our session, moving away from a VM-centric world isn’t just about cost savings. It’s about achieving greater agility, fostering a happier and more autonomous staff, and embarking on a broader digital transformation journey.

Think of it like moving house. It’s an opportunity to shed what you don’t need, understand your current estate, and align with a future vision, rather than just a “lift and shift”.

Our VMware Migration Experts

David O’Dwyer, Founder and Director of LiveWyer, a consultancy specialising in helping companies build highly scalable, adaptable, and operationally resilient cloud platforms, and supporting them with cloud-native modernisation and containerisation efforts.

Daniel Banche, Senior Systems Engineer at Pure Storage, home to Portworx, a crucial product in the industry for containerisation of state in Kubernetes. Portworx simplifies storage for all workloads, including virtual and physical machines, and containerised environments. Notably, Portworx can extend its container-aware data protection, like granular backups, to VMs when they run as processes within containers.

Anthony Hodson from Kubermatic, focusing on scalable Kubernetes solutions that enable organisations to run numerous clusters efficiently, providing economies of scale and empowering developers with their own Kubernetes environments.

Moving from VMware

It’s important to understand that the transition isn’t an “all or nothing” approach. Many organisations will operate in a hybrid environment, balancing traditional VM-based workloads with new containerised services. In fact, it’s increasingly possible to run virtual machines inside Kubernetes, allowing for consistent management through a single specification or “manifest”. This consistency is crucial for agility, enabling easy creation of copies, parallel testing, and spinning up ephemeral environments.

Where to start your modernisation journey

Consider the data, its value, its criticality, and its access patterns. Whether data is read-only or involves destructive interactions (writes) significantly influences whether it stays with VMs or moves to a containerised context or can be removed all together!

Begin with workloads that are as well-known as possible to understand the “unknown unknowns” and the boundaries of your current estate, especially for legacy VMs that may have been running for 20 years. This is a chance for thorough housekeeping and discovery.

Prioritise productivity gains. A focus on services where modernisation can deliver the most significant productivity gains for developers is beneficial. Services with long feedback loops (e.g., a week-long deployment pipeline) are ideal candidates, as containerisation can drastically reduce this to minutes, providing immense value and getting teams on board.

Pitfalls and Anti-patterns

1. Unrealistic Timelines: Don’t expect to move hundreds of VMs in a single year. This is a gradual process that requires safety and careful execution, not just speed.

2. Lack of Due Diligence: Avoid simply treating every VM the same. It’s critical to interrogate the workload running within each VM. Don’t skip the review by assuming it’s easier to keep a VM as is. Often, you will find that parts can be containerised with additional effort.

3. Oversized VMs: Don’t move a VM that consumes an entire underlying hardware instance directly into Kubernetes without re-evaluating its purpose.

4. Ignoring Dependencies: Failing to understand your application’s dependencies is a major challenge. Tools can help, but ultimately, you’ll need a better grasp of how your applications work.

5. Hasty Decisions: Rushing the discovery process or being “lazy” in due diligence can lead to significant unexpected costs.

Benefits of migrating from VMware

The power of unification and Kubernetes means that by moving to a containerised or Kubernetes space forces you to think differently about your workloads, defining liveness, health, and what “working” truly means.

This shift can lead to profound benefits:

1. Improved Recovery and Efficiency: Kubernetes can reschedule a downed service in seconds, dramatically reducing recovery times compared to traditional VM failovers (which might take 5-10 seconds). This can even lead to hardware savings as you might need fewer instances for high availability.

2. Standardisation and Consistency: You achieve a unified and standardised approach to managing all your workloads, whether these are VM-based or containerised.

3. Team Alignment: When teams operate within a similar context and speak the same language, collaboration improves, and they can rely on platforms to provide consistent capabilities.

4. Portability and Strength: Embracing open-source and open-core solutions provides greater portability and puts you in a position of strength in discussions with your providers.

Ultimately, this transformation is about making systematical gains and validating your understanding of each service as it transitions. It’s a continuous journey.

Next Time

We’ve only scratched the surface! In our next session, we drop down a level into more hands-on practices and detailed tooling to help those making these decisions determine if this route is right for your applications. We look forward to continuing this journey with you!

This blog is part of our VMware Migration series, we recommend reading the rest of the posts in the series:

• VMware Migration - The migration is just the beginning
• VMware Migration - Unpacking the technologies
• VMware Migration - Technical Demos & Outcome Based Pilots