As enterprises struggle to devise a VMware exit, many will turn to Managed Service Providers (MSPs) for assistance in planning and executing a successful, non-disruptive migration of their virtual infrastructure. This presents a unique opportunity for MSPs who can deliver a migration strategy that brings value to their clients while improving their services bottom line.
The key to selling a successful migration is to have a reliable, repeatable migration process that can be scaled to fit any client and still deliver the same level of speed, performance, and safety. Platform9’s free migration solution, vJailbreak, is the basis for a migration process that works, time and time again.
The MSP Workflow — Running vJailbreak at Scale
The real value of vJailbreak for MSPs isn’t just that it works — it’s that it enables a repeatable, seven-step engagement model that you can standardize across every client migration project.
Step 1: Pre-Migration Assessment
Deploy vJailbreak in read-only discovery mode against the client’s vCenter. Use the automatic VM inventory to capture every VM, its storage footprint, network configuration, and OS type. This becomes the foundation of your project scope, migration wave plan, and statement of work. Clients are often surprised by what’s actually running in their environment — this step frequently surfaces VMs that haven’t been touched in years and can be decommissioned rather than migrated, reducing project scope immediately.
Step 2: Environment Preparation
Stand up the Private Cloud Director environment on the client’s existing hardware. Deploy the vJailbreak VM into the target Private Cloud Director environment using the ORAS toolkit to pull the latest image. Configure network access between the vJailbreak VM and both the source vCenter environment and the target Private Cloud Director environment. Set up DNS resolution for all ESXi hosts. This is your pre-flight phase — no VM moves until everything here is verified.
Step 3: Credential and Mapping Configuration
Connect vJailbreak to vCenter using admin credentials, and to the OpenStack/Private Cloud Director environment via the admin.rc file. Configure network mapping (which VMware port groups map to which Private Cloud Director networks) and storage mapping (which VMware datastores map to which OpenStack volume backends). Getting the mapping right is critical — mistakes here propagate across every VM in the wave.
Step 4: Pilot Migration
Never start with production. Select 3–5 non-critical VMs that represent the variety of workload types in the environment (different OS versions, storage backends, network configurations) and run a pilot migration wave. Validate VM identity, network connectivity, application behavior, and storage performance before touching anything that matters. Document every issue you find and the resolution. This becomes the playbook for the production waves.
Step 5: Production Migration Waves
Structure the production migration as a series of planned waves, organized by workload risk tier. Non-critical development and test systems go first. Core business applications go last. Within each wave, use vJailbreak’s parallel scaling capability to run multiple migrations simultaneously and hit your daily throughput target. Real-time status tracking in the vJailbreak UI lets your team monitor progress without manual check-ins.
Step 6: Cutover and Validation
For each VM, execute the admin cutover once the CBT sync is current. vJailbreak preserves network configuration and system identifiers, but always run your validation checklist: verify the VM powers on, confirm network connectivity from both inside and outside the VM, validate application startup behavior, and check storage mount integrity. Sign off each VM before moving to the next batch.
Step 7: Host Reimaging (Optional)
For clients doing a full VMware exit, use vJailbreak’s cluster conversion to reclaim the ESXi hosts as Private Cloud Director nodes. This is done host-by-host: live-migrate any remaining VMs off the host, trigger the automated reimage process, and bring the host into the Private Cloud Director cluster. The client ends up with 100% of their hardware running Private Cloud Director, with no VMware licensing footprint remaining.
For MSPs evaluating the underlying platform you’d run this practice on, see how Private Cloud Director is designed for provider environments.
The Relationship Doesn’t Stop After the Migration
For MSPs, the opportunity here is larger than a single migration project. The VMware disruption has created a once-in-a-generation wave of infrastructure change, and enterprises are actively searching for trusted partners to guide them through it. By standardizing on a repeatable migration workflow built around vJailbreak, MSPs can transform what might otherwise be one-off consulting engagements into a scalable services offering. Each migration becomes faster, more predictable, and more profitable as your team refines the playbook and applies it across multiple clients. The result is not just a successful VMware exit, but a structured delivery model your organization can reuse again and again.
More importantly, the migration itself is only the beginning of the relationship. Once workloads land on Private Cloud Director, MSPs are well positioned to provide ongoing managed infrastructure services, modernization guidance, and lifecycle operations. What starts as a VMware exit quickly becomes a long-term platform partnership.
