Gartner just published a research note titled “Estimating a Large-Scale VMware Migrations” that details the burdens expected for large-sized companies moving off of VMware. The Register’s Simon Sharwood wrote an article  on this research note. He highlighted the concerns tens of thousands of VMware customers are facing that large-scale migrations are daunting, often taking 18-48 months to complete, with costs ranging from $300 to $3,000 per VM.

With Platform9, migrations can happen in weeks to months and at 1/10th of the cost. In fact, a Fortune 500 enterprise has contracted with Platform9 to migrate 40,000 VMs at $35 per VM.

This customer is managing more than 40,000 VMs and 3,000 hypervisors and evaluated multiple alternatives, including Nutanix, Hyper-V, Proxmox and Red Hat and chose our Private Cloud Director because it is the only solution that met all of their enterprise requirements.

By March, this customer will be migrating more than 200 VMs per day using vJailbreak, an open source tool we created to help users migrate 1000s of VMware VMs to Private Cloud Director.

vJailbreak is the only solution that orchestrates all the aspects of migration – reducing risk and manual labor and increasing customer confidence:

1. Delightful, modern UX focused on migration from VMware with point and click simplicity.
2. Scalable architecture that can span to multiple migration agents to migrate 100s of VMs concurrently.
3. Discovery of VMs and their associated metadata, storage and network configuration; and easily porting those across.
4. Live migration of VMs using change-block-tracking; with only a few minutes of downtime required to turn off the original and power on the newly migrated copy.
5. Automation for common migration pain points, such as dynamic volumes, uninstalling and handling VMware tools, IP addresses, MAC addresses, secondary disks, system identifiers.
6. Planned support for raw device mappings and clustered VMs.
7. Planned support for in-place rolling migration of an entire VMware cluster, into a KVM based cluster.

Private Cloud Director gives enterprises the simplest private cloud experience with all of the critical enterprise features of VMware: VM High Availability, Cluster Rebalancing, VM Live Migration, Distributed Virtual Switches and Software Defined Networking, interoperability with all existing hardware investments including 3rd party storage.

We know VMware better than anyone – back in the day, we developed VMware vCloud Director, VMware’s original private cloud offering used by the world’s largest enterprises that is now a precursor to Broadcom’s VMware Cloud Foundation.

Are you looking to migrate off VMware?

We’re here to help every step of the way. From understanding your unique challenges to guiding you through the migration process, our team is committed to making your transition as smooth as possible. Reach out today to learn more about how we can help you migrate off VMware in weeks to a robust, enterprise-grade alternative.

Want to experience it yourself?  Sign up for our monthly 0-60 virtualization labs.

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Madhura Maskasky

Before co-founding Platform9, Madhura spent 7 years at VMware Engineering, where she grew to be technical lead for several key products including vCloud Director, Update Manager and Config Control.

Madhura helped spearhead vSphere’s transformation into a policy driven product suite, working broadly across groups to pull together the vision. Madhura holds a M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University, specializing in databases and distributed systems.

Latest posts by Madhura Maskasky (see all)

• The Register reports: “VMware migrations will be long, expensive, risky,” Gartner warns - January 30, 2025
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• Introducing Arlon! Your Kubernetes ClusterManagement Assembly Line - September 20, 2022