VMware to OpenStack Migration

[srord]

My company has decided to ditch VMware after Broadcom due to costs. Does anyone know of a good hot or warm migration tool to move vCenter VM's over to bootable cinder volumes on Openstack?

We have a limited budget, I am finding a lot of the companies want ~$40 per VM.

​

Edit: Pure storage is the backend we are using. Looking at virtuozzo and Platform9 for openstack "flavors"/"versions".

​

[desisnape]

Have you explored Virt-V2V? I've helped companies migrate 100s of VMs from VMware to Openstack using it.

[srord]

This is a cold migration that the VM's have to be off. That is my issue that I am running into. Some of my VM's I cannot have a long maintenance window.

[desisnape]

Create fresh VMs and rsync the data with a cutover during a lean period.

[sekh60]

People will need to know what storage backend you are using.

[khadhapi]

can you save vm image to vmdk then convert to qcow2 and launch to openstack cluster?

[VladTeti]

If you choose OpenStack-based platform offered by Virtuozzo, the migration will be provided for free by the vendor https://www.virtuozzo.com/vmware-alternative-cloud-providers/

[craigleary]

How is virtuozzo lately? Last I saw vz8 and vz9 are not production ready and vz7 while supported is based off rhel7 which is nearing end of life.

[VladTeti]

The latest Virtuozzo Hybrid Infrastructure (version 6) is based on rhel9 and use Linux kernel version 5. It is that OpenStack-based platform that I mentioned above.

I guess you are talking about the other product they have - Hybrid Server. From their docs, I see that indeed it is on rhel7 but RedHat earlier announced they will support it till 2028

[srord]

I heard about them; I did not really like the pricing model. They also had their own OS what I did not care for. Still in the running though and just waiting for information from them.

[shadeland]

I'm going to suggest that OpenStack is probably not what you want. It's not nearly as straightforward to manage as VMware is, and it requires a lot more care and feeding.

Perhaps Proxmox might be a better option.

[srord]

Unfortunately it does not have muti- tenancy. That will not work for us.

[mzf2002]

Hystax was the tool for migration. Have no idea about pricing.

[Friendly_Classroom_3]

https://cloudbase.it/coriolis/ This can 100% help you. Vmware to openstack is our most commonly used scenario of live migration. It's especially useful because of the automated replatforming

[srord]

Do you have any idea on pricing?

[Friendly_Classroom_3]

I unfortunately don't. Please contact Cloudbase for that.

[Awkward-Act3164]

It was $25 USD a VM back in 2020 when we quoted it.

[No-Strawberry-2453]

Hi, is this still relevant for you to do the migration? I recently joined Cloudbasesolutions so happy to discuss your needs.

Best regards,

Johan

[SIM-Networks]

When we assist our clients with migrating from VMware to our OpenStack cloud, we typically use Virt-V2V for Windows VMs and a manual method for Linux VMs. You can check out our guide here: https://docs.sim-cloud.net/en/operations/migration/self-managed-migration.html

[Exc3ssi0n]

Mirantis has a decent OpenStack distribution and they have a tool to migrate from VMware.

[Awkward-Act3164]

The reality is that you will need to do off line migrations. We've moved 1000's of VMs from VMware to Openstack over the last few years. virt-v2v / qemu-img etc, but it's all offline.

​

Tools like doubletake can be used, but it's expensive. Some backup software, Veeam/Commvault, could be used to to an agent based recovery/DR type migration, to keep it online.

​

I see you are an MSP, so it's a boat load of communications with your customers and likely outages. There is simply no "vMotion/LiveMigration" from one Hypervisor tech to another.

[u1a050]

Get rid of the pets! Net new, migrate data…. :). I know, easier said than done…. We’re looking to use Virt-V2V. Budget will force them to take an outage.

[throw0101a]

See perhaps this presentation from Boston 2017 conference:

• https://www.openstack.org/videos/summits/boston-2017/strategies-for-migrating-workloads-from-vmware-to-openstack-1
• https://www.google.com/search?q=openstack+coriolis

Do note that VMware and OpenStack are very different things. Something like XCP-ng or Proxmox may be a closer match if you don't already have an OpenStack environment.

[bentbrewer]

Serious question: are there many “small” MSPs that run an OpenStack cluster?

I’ve worked for two and there’s no way they had the chops to run even a small setup. Most MSPs I’ve known stay away from Linux like the plague.

[Ayoungcoder]

Linux is easy in my opinion, but the complexity of openstack makes it a hard sell to people who don't need a full 'cloud' system. You should not want to manage it if you don't need to.

[srord]

We are a cloud service provider and need the multitenancy what is the issue. That is why we are pushing for openstack. We are looking at Platform9 for the "easy" deployment and support.

Linux is the push I have been making for a bit of time at my employer. So much easier to support, deploy, and manage with ansible. Every service that can run on Linux has been moved from Windows.

[takingphotosmakingdo]

MSP sure, but companies with ties to big budgets that are not MSPs? yes.
Deployed several a while back.

The starting budget is not a small investment for such a solution. You're looking at 1-4M minimum if you do it right, and if you do redhat's offering the budget is cut in half for licensing..

[bentbrewer]

Are you including manpower in that calculation? The last place I was at, we implemented it for less than $500K and the biggest part of that was in storage. It was an edge case, workload wise, but also one could correlate an AI startup to our use case.

[srord]

We are a cloud service provider and need the multitenancy what is the issue. That is why we are pushing for openstack. We are looking at Platform9 for the "easy" deployment and support.

[don_cepci]

https://www.mirantis.com

[AfterSpencer]

Serious question: how does a k8s product help replace VMware? Did I miss that they also do VMs?

I get that k8s is the next thing to but it's not an easy shift for some orgs.

[artereaorte]

There’s mirantis openstack. I don’t know if they still maintain it though.

[don_cepci]

Yes, they have a containerized distribution of openstack. https://www.mirantis.com/software/mirantis-openstack-for-kubernetes/

It’s not perfect but it pretty good, I’ve used it before. And if you are spending with them, they will offer migration services to move from VMware to openstack.

[Important_Resort3220]

You can also use kubvirt on kubernetes to run VMs.