Migration journey from VMware to Openstack - Hystax

Last couple of years have been a rollercoaster ride of emotions for companies that have been heavily invested in the VMware product family to host their on-premises applications and databases workloads. Leading organizations across all industries, not limited to just those that held security & availability paramount, have had a great relationship with VMware over the past decade to host mission critical workloads. I still recollect my time spent in one of the largest hedge funds in the world where VMware was so well trusted that their entire infrastructure was hosted on VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). And this place never compromised security for cost optimization. Those glorious days of vMonopoly are over!!

A company that once pioneered Virtualization, the abstraction of underlying hardware which opened doors to today's idea of Public Cloud, that had the potential to become a FAANG, is now biting the dust!!

After Broadcom's acquisition of VMware, there has been a lot of noise in the industry with licensing models changed from perpetual to subscription based and customers being forced to purchase more than what they need, like how we feel walking out of a Costco outlet :)

Many companies chose to do away their real estate, physical assets and migrate to Public Cloud with AWS, Azure and GCP leading the race by providing out of the box and turnkey solutions for services offering Security, Scalability and Resiliency. Few others turned to Hyperconverged solutions like Nutanix that offered solutions similar to vSAN and those born out of a Dell-VMware collaboration (VxRack, VXRail etc).

And then, there are others that chose open-source Cloud solutions, like Openstack by leveraging their existing physical infrastructure assets. Of course, now there are vendors like RedHat, Mirantis, Platform9 that offer their own brand of Openstack based solutions so it's not typically opensource anymore. This solution offers companies more control over their infrastructure and continue using the same tools and services, except they will no longer be running on VMware, but on another Private Cloud Platform that looks like a distant cousin of AWS or Azure.

I have been actively working on migrating application and database workloads from VMware to RedHat Openstack for over a year now. Due to license renewal fears, most of the products are in a mad rush for a VMexit. Hence, the game plan has been a lift and shift (rehost) just move to Openstack now and replatform / refactor later if necessary!

One of the lesser-known tools I have been using to get this job done is Hystax Acura. Never had the opportunity to leverage this tool before this migration effort. I was pleasantly surprised and amazed at the simplicity, seamlessness and the ease at which application and database workloads could be migrated from VMware servers to the target Openstack Platform. And there are licensing costs, charged per replication which is typically one per workload unless you are cloning at the target.

This tool also offers Disaster Recovery (DR) protection something Openstack does not natively offer. Few of the customers I interacted with, have been protecting VMs with VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) and looking for similar options after moving to Openstack. After a bit of research, I finally reached back to Hystax only to learn they do offer a DR solution protection at the Project (VPC) layer. Something I have been looking forward to implement when I get a chance.

Hystax Acura is agent based and supports offline replication. After agents are deployed on source workloads, a full replication kick off is triggered along with incremental replication after a full sync is completed for the first time. Under the hood, Hystax Acura creates a snapshot of the replicated workload, creates identical volumes as source from this snapshot and attaches to Hystax Agent VMs on Openstack. During the final cutover, new target instances get launched based on VM metadata (network, OS flavor, subnet, VM selection) defined in the Migration Plan. The target VM boots off the replicated boot volumes and gets the additional data volumes attached. Restores can be targeted either from the latest restore point, or from a point from another incremental round of replication or from a different point in time.

The other dependencies like Hostnames resolutions, Monitoring, Backups, Password Vaults need to be worked around the migration with different stakeholders. Also, necessary Networking, Security Groups, Firewalls needs to be opened up at the target Cloud and kept ready before cutover for a seamless transition.

So far I have had the opportunity only to migrate workloads to Openstack with this powerful tool. Hystax also supports AWS, Azure and other Public Cloud providers which I'm looking to explore soon.

I don't have any screenshots to bolster my views, as I have been using this tool only at work.

Check out the following video from Hystax's channel for more information.

Hystax Acura Live Cloud Migration overview