Solution
Leaving proprietary virtualisation
A licence renewal that doubles the cost of virtualisation isn’t a technical question to begin with. It becomes one the moment you look at what would have to move, and in what order.
Taking the hypervisor back
The cost of leaving is costed before the decision
How many machines, which dependencies, how much downtime per service. A renewal negotiation goes better with that figure in hand.
The destination is chosen, not inherited
An open hypervisor on your own hardware, a Swiss host, or a public cloud depending on the service. Nothing requires everything to move to the same place.
Machines move one at a time
Migration in waves, with a way back for as long as the old environment runs. The big-bang night doesn’t exist in this trade.
Backups move with it
The new estate gets backed up, and a restore runs before the old one switches off, not after.
In practice
- Inventory of the virtual estate: machines, allocated resources, resources actually used
- The cost of staying set against the cost of leaving, over the same period
- Migration to Proxmox, KVM, Hyper-V or a hosting provider, depending on what the estate requires
- Machine conversion and snapshot handling, service by service
- Backup and restore rebuilt on the new platform, and tried
- Automated rebuilding, so the estate does not become manual again
Systems involved
- VMware vSphere and the virtual estates in place
- Proxmox, KVM and Hyper-V
- Shared storage and existing arrays
- Enterprise backup products
- Swiss hosts, when the machine no longer has to stay on your premises
Service lineServers and hosting →
Which estates
The same work, against each sector’s own constraints. Every card opens the full sector.
Banking and insurance
Leaving proprietary virtualisation
The virtual estate carrying the management applications changes platform in waves, each step costed and documented for internal review.
Energy and utilities
Changing hypervisor in waves
The estate carrying supervision and operational tooling moves after a pilot, with the windows, criteria, dependencies, restore and rollback defined. The possible disruption gets stated, not denied.
How it runs
Estate
What actually runs, what is allocated, and what could disappear with no visible effect.
Costing
Stay or leave, over three years, with engineering time counted on both sides.
Waves
The least critical services move first, which teaches the procedure before it matters.
Switch-off
The old environment stays up until the first successful restore on the new one, then stops.
Dependencies and next steps
Test the fit: Leaving proprietary virtualisation
Describe the context, constraints and decision you need to make. The first conversation qualifies scope, boundaries and the next useful step.
Describe the situation