The Strategic Challenge: Navigating a Changing Virtualization Landscape

In an era of shifting virtualization economics and a relentless demand for cloud-native agility, many organizations are re-evaluating their long-standing VMware infrastructure. The traditional approach of managing separate, siloed environments for virtual machines and containers has become a significant source of operational friction. This separation often leads to increased licensing costs, duplicated effort, skill gaps, and a slower time-to-market for the modern applications that drive business innovation.

The need for a unified platform that streamlines operations, reduces maintenance overhead, and accelerates development is more critical than ever. Enterprises require a clear, expert-led path to migrate their existing workloads, ensure business continuity, and empower their IT teams with a platform built for the future.

The Solution: An Expert-Led VMware to OpenShift Migration

The Li9 VMware to OpenShift Migration is an accelerated service designed to smoothly transition your VMware workloads to the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. Our engagement is led by Li9’s Red Hat Certified Architects (RHCAs), who leverage deep expertise in both V2V (Virtual Machine to Virtual Machine) and V2C (Virtual Machine App to Container App) migration methods to ensure a seamless and successful transition tailored to your specific needs.

This solution positions OpenShift Virtualization as the single, unified platform for managing both virtual machines and containers side-by-side. This eliminates the need for separate management tools, breaks down operational silos, and provides a consistent, powerful interface for your entire application portfolio. For organizations seeking a complete turnkey private cloud, this service can be integrated with IBM Fusion HCI and other IBM Storage solutions to provide a pre-engineered, enterprise-grade hardware and software stack.

Deliverables

Upon completion of the VMware to OpenShift Migration service, you will receive:

• A Production-Ready OpenShift Environment: A fully configured OpenShift cluster with OpenShift Virtualization enabled and validated.
• Successfully Migrated Workloads: Your selected VMware virtual machines and applications running natively on the new OpenShift platform.
• A Comprehensive Migration Plan: Detailed documentation outlining the strategy, tools, and processes used during the migration.
• Custom Automation Artifacts: All scripts and automation playbooks developed for the migration, available for your future use.
• Complete Documentation & Training: Architectural diagrams, operational runbooks, and hands-on training sessions to ensure your team is fully equipped for success.

The Li9 Implementation Journey: A Phased Approach to Migration Success

Our proven methodology ensures a structured, low-risk migration from start to finish.

Phase 1: Discovery The engagement begins with a collaborative workshop involving all key stakeholders. Our architects work with your team to gather detailed requirements, perform a comprehensive assessment of your existing VMware infrastructure and application dependencies, and define the precise scope of the migration.

Phase 2: Planning & Tooling Based on the discovery findings, we develop a detailed workload migration plan. This includes identifying the optimal migration strategy (V2V or V2C) for each application and deploying and configuring the necessary migration tools, such as the OpenShift Migration Toolkit for Virtualization.

Phase 3: Automation Development To minimize manual effort and accelerate the migration process, we build custom automation scripts and playbooks. This ensures the migration is repeatable, consistent, and less prone to human error, which is especially critical for large-scale environments.

Phase 4: Workload Migration This is the core execution phase where our architects perform the actual migration of your VMware vSphere workloads to the new Red Hat OpenShift environment. We can perform pilot migrations and provide Virtual Server Migration Demos to validate the process and build confidence before migrating production systems.

Phase 5: Knowledge Transfer A successful migration concludes with an empowered team. We provide extensive hands-on training, comprehensive architectural documentation, and operational runbooks to ensure your teams are proficient and self-sufficient in managing your new, unified OpenShift environment post-engagement.

The Business Value Proposition: Accelerate, Simplify, and Optimize Your IT

By partnering with Li9 for your VMware to OpenShift migration, you can expect tangible business outcomes.

• Accelerated Innovation: Significantly reduce environment setup times and improve development velocity, leading to a faster time-to-market for both existing and modernized applications.
• Streamlined Operations: A single, unified platform for managing VMs and containers eliminates separate management tools, simplifies your IT landscape, and reduces operational complexity.
• Reduced Maintenance Overhead: Realize a measurable reduction in operational effort, allowing your valuable IT staff to focus on strategic initiatives rather than day-to-day infrastructure management.
• Cost Efficiency: Optimize resource utilization, consolidate licensing, and potentially achieve significant cost savings by moving to a single, converged virtualization and container platform.
• Future-Proof Infrastructure: Build a flexible, scalable, and resilient foundation that is ready for cloud-native applications and future growth, with the ability to integrate advanced solutions like watsonx for AI.
• Empowered Teams: Our comprehensive knowledge transfer ensures your internal teams are proficient in managing and extending their new OpenShift environment, fostering in-house expertise.

Why Choose Li9 for Your Migration Journey?

Li9 is your trusted partner for complex enterprise migrations. We are recognized experts in automation and application modernization, with a proven ability to combine industry best practices with your unique requirements to achieve crucial business and technology goals. As a designated partner for both IBM and Red Hat, we have demonstrated our ability to envision, shape, and execute digital transformation roadmaps for customers of all sizes and complexities.