A conversation with Chris DeFortuna, Cloud and Infrastructure Manager at Meriplex
When Broadcom’s restructuring of the VCSP program cut Meriplex’s route to market, Chris DeFortuna and his team didn’t just lose a vendor relationship. They lost the foundation of a managed cloud business that had been running on VMware for nearly two decades, serving thousands of customer workloads across nine data centers. We sat down with Chris to talk through what happened next: the false start on Microsoft Hyper-V, the hard internal conversation that followed, and the decision to bet the cloud business on Platform9 and Private Cloud Director.
What follows is a lightly edited transcript of that conversation. Chris’s words are his own.
To set the stage: VCSP wasn’t just one bad day. You went through this twice. Walk us through what happened.
We were given the news the previous year that VMware was cutting down its resellers and partners. We were accepted into the next program, so we thought we were golden. Good news, green light, moving ahead. We signed a three-year agreement.
Then a little over a year later, we were notified they were doing it again. They were going down to like 10 or 20 partners total. That’s it. And we did not make the cut.
What were your real options at that point?
We had two options. One: go with a partner they signed with and move all your business to them. That’s not what we were about to do. The other option: find something else.
“You had two options. Move all your business to one of the chosen partners—which wasn’t what we were about to do. Or find something else.”
You ended up evaluating a lot of alternatives before you got to Platform9. Where did the search start?
The team dug in right away. We had multiple internal meetings and threw everything out there on the floor—Proxmox, Red Hat, OpenStack, OpenShift. I had a whole Excel spreadsheet of all the hypervisors out there. We ranked them by features and what fit our needs.
We didn’t feel comfortable with anything. We spoke with several vendors. We spoke with Microsoft directly. We were starting to go down the Hyper-V path, even though we weren’t comfortable with it to begin with.
At what point did you realize Hyper-V wasn’t going to work?
Hyper-V is very limited in what you can do with it. There’s no native multi-tenancy. There’s no control panel. We spent weeks trying to find a control panel that would work for Hyper-V, and what we found mostly wasn’t viable. You’d search the address of these vendors and it was a post office box in a strip mall. Support was non-existent. We did some proofs of concept and they just didn’t pan out to what they were supposed to be.
We’ve been doing cloud at scale for a long time, and Windows hosts alone present problems. Linux workloads don’t work well on Hyper-V either, and a big part of our customer base runs on Linux-based appliances. So the whole foundation was wrong.
We spent weeks trying to find a control panel that would work for Hyper-V. You’d search the address of these vendors and it was a post office box in a strip mall.
I had to backtrack on what I’d already sold the company. We were hoping we’d have a control panel option. None of them panned out. It was a hard sell. I had many meetings with leadership. They were taking our word for it and listening to the technical people to make these right decisions.
“I had to backtrack on what I’d already sold the company.”
What was non-negotiable in your evaluation? What did the next platform have to have?
Control panel. 100%.
We have over 2,000 customer VMs in our Philadelphia data center alone. We acquired SSI back in the day and that brought a strong cloud footprint. We’ve since consolidated to three core cloud data centers—Philadelphia, Houston, and Las Vegas—but the goal was always to get everything under a real control panel so our techs can troubleshoot and operate without escalating every routine task to my team.
The core team isn’t big enough to handle every customer call for a VM resize or a hard drive expansion. The control panel needs to come into play so the techs can do their jobs and my team can stay focused on the back end.
Beyond the control panel, what stood out about Platform9?
The multi-tenancy was the right fit. Our customers expect strong isolation and workload dependability. They have minimal tolerance for downtime and they have many other cloud options. Platform9’s open architecture, multi-tenancy, workload isolation, quotas, and governance gave us the control we needed.
The integrations stayed too. Platform9 works with the storage we already had in place and the operational stack our team lives in. Nothing had to be ripped out.
How important was vJailbreak in the decision?
It mattered a lot. We didn’t have a clear migration path from VMware to Hyper-V—that was a real gap when we were evaluating that direction. As we dug deeper into Platform9 and saw vJailbreak, we factored the time savings into our calculations. Linux migrations specifically were going to be a problem with Hyper-V. With vJailbreak, that wasn’t a blocker anymore.
You mentioned that you’ve been seeing your feedback show up in the product. What does that look like in practice?
For the short time we’ve been together, we’re already starting to see some of our suggestions work their way into the code. That’s huge.
There are things I wish I could fix in vCloud Director that I’m hoping I’ll see come through in Platform9’s control panel over time. The fact that we’re working with a vendor who is focused on this as their core business—not a side project—makes a real difference.
“For the short time we’ve been together, we’re already seeing our suggestions show up in the code. That’s huge. The fact that we’re working with a vendor who treats this as their core business—not a side project—makes a real difference.”
What advice would you give other service providers facing the same decision right now?
I have a lot of friends in the industry. Some of them are staying on VMware through a sanctioned partner. They’re enterprise shops with different economics than us—not MSPs or cloud providers—so the math works for them. Others are going down the Hyper-V road.
What I’d tell anyone in our position: Hyper-V might be fine if you’re running five or six hosts. But if you’re operating at scale—if cloud is your business—you need something more robust. You need real multi-tenancy. You need a control panel that scales. And you need a vendor who treats this as their primary focus, not an adjunct product.
There’s no easy button for this. There’s no one-to-one migration that gives you everything VMware had. So you’re picking the partnership you want to bet on for the next decade. That’s the actual decision.
“There’s no easy button for this. There’s no one-to-one migration that gives you everything VMware had. So you’re picking the partnership you want to bet on for the next decade. That’s the actual decision.”
About Meriplex
Meriplex is a national managed IT and cybersecurity provider serving mid-market and specialized industries from multiple data centers across the United States. A CRN MSP 500 member, Meriplex provides reliable, scalable cloud solutions to a broad range of businesses.
About Platform9
Platform9 helps service providers and enterprises run modern private clouds on the hardware and storage they already own. Private Cloud Director delivers enterprise virtualization—high availability, live migration, intelligent resource balancing, and multi-tenancy—without proprietary lock-in. Built on open standards (KVM, OpenStack, Kubernetes) and operated as a SaaS-managed service.
Learn more about Platform9 for Service Providers
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