Wondering about VMware migration routes? One user's story with Red Hat

Open source software provider Red Hat is flourishing under IBM’s ownership. Over the past 12 months the company has made $300 million in OpenShift Virtualization total bookings. In 2024 this was attributed to lots of migration work, no doubt buoyed by VMware’s new subscription-based pricing leading to customers moving away from the Broadcom-owned platform. 

More recently it is being driven by app modernization techniques as enterprises experiment with gen AI, and pursue further expansion to use of public clouds. Red Hat recently ran a briefing with its flagship customer Emirates NBD who shared experiences of deploying OpenShift Virtualization to migrate away from VMware.

Emirates NBD migration story

Emirates NBD is one of the largest banks in the United Arab Emirates. Based in Dubai, it operates in 13 countries and launched its OpenShift-based banking cloud, called Sahab, in 2017. It currently has 37,000 containers in production handling over 2,000 API calls per day.

Nicholas Grimm, Head of Cloud Compute for Emirates NBD explained: 

The 'elephant in the room' was VMware and the prohibitive cost of moving forward. We had a container environment that was different to our platform environment and we needed to manage consistency by standardizing the overall environment.” Emirates NBD undertook extensive testing to find what would suit best as it transformed its hypervisor layer.

Grimm says:

We use OpenShift Virtualization for on-premises and public cloud environments and we have a lot of faith in the product. We have had issues as we have gone along but we have been able to confidently go forward in meeting our requirements. Using OpenShift we have been able to standardize and simplify the environment. Because our world has not changed that much, we have not needed to wildly transform everything we do. We wanted to be able to scale exponentially to meet month-end demands and deploy in different regions.

When we started out, we wanted to do everything at once, but what we realised quickly is that it is better to go with small achievable pieces. We are leaving our plumbing such as firewalls as they are, as we can optimise these later. We wanted to do the migration offline but the line of business heads said that we needed to do this online. We worked closely with Red Hat and Dell as partners for the migration. We were migrating 140 VMs per night, working at pace across multiple data centers.

The firm was bold in its thinking, he recalls: 

We looked at the entire footprint of apps, we have more than 150, and were advised to migrate the less critical ones first. However, we considered a number of factors, such as the technical intricacies involved and what was running in the background and decided to move multiple apps. We went for the core banking apps first, and then the payment systems and trading systems.

We were considered crazy to go for the core banking applications first along with the underlying operating systems. We wanted to pick small and complex workloads and the approach worked, as the majority of apps we migrated, moved across seamlessly. It was actually the Windows environments that added complexity.

Because we were migrating at scale we have introduced a lot of automation. We have an automation mantra which is ‘anything that has to be done more than once we automate’. The other important thing we did is that we made sure the Operations team walked the road with us. There was no concept of throwing things over a wall for Operations to catch.

Red Hat rescue roadmap

As many VMware customers actively develop migration plans to alternative virtualization platforms or public cloud providers, Red Hat will be providing new deployment options to assist with OpenShift Virtualization to move workloads from the Edge to the Cloud. A two-node smaller footprint option with its own arbiter was previewed at the briefing, as well as support beyond IBM Cloud and AWS for self-managed or managed services to Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Google Cloud.

As for criticisms that organizations lack the skills to take advantage of OpenShift Virtualization, Red Hat has developed a gen AI-based conversational assistant for OpenShift called OpenShift Lightspeed. The idea is for OpenShift Lightspeed to support traditional vAdmins as they transition to OpenShift Virtualization. It is context aware and trained on VMware to OpenShift product terms to guide vAdmins in daily tasks and troubleshooting.

Other advances coming soon include live migration of VMs and storage across clusters, the provision of incremental storage backup and support for Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and Ethernet Virtual Private Network (EVPN) to be able to define networks across clusters. In terms of the broader technology partner ecosystem, Red Hat will also soon be making new announcements with Commvault and Citrix.

My take

Clearly Red Hat is in a strong position to capitalize on VMware’s pricing woes under Broadcom ownership. Red Hat offers a unified platform approach with OpenShift’s ability to manage both containers and virtual machines. Emirates NBD provides a good example of a customer that has successfully made the migration journey to this unified platform. While other hypervisor migration options from the likes of Nutanix and AWS are available, Red Hat’s biggest challenge is overcoming the inertia of the VMware base. Surely an IBM company can crack that marketing nut?