Modernizing a Federal Agency’s Virtualization Environment with Nutanix AHV Breadcrumb Home Insights Modernizing a Federal Agency’s Virtualization Environment with Nutanix AHV The Situation Navigating VMware/Broadcom Changes Across a Complex Federal Environment Following Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware and subsequent licensing changes, a federal agency needed to reevaluate its existing VMware ESXi environment. The customer was operating three ESXi clusters, two on one network and a third on a classified network. The clusters had originally been deployed and managed by ClearShark Services, giving the Optiv + ClearShark team extensive knowledge of the customer’s infrastructure and workloads. At the same time, the customer was preparing to deploy additional clusters, creating an opportunity to establish a consistent hypervisor platform across its environments. The customer needed a migration strategy that could address the increased cost of its VMware environment while minimizing disruption to its existing workloads. The Action A phased migration strategy The team used a phased migration strategy across all three clusters to minimize operational disruption. Two clusters on the same network For the two clusters on the same network, the team used Nutanix Move to migrate virtual machines from one cluster to the other, emptying the clusters one at a time before destroying and rebuilding each while the other hosted all guest VMs. Once the second cluster was rebuilt using AHV all VMs were returned to their original clusters now running AHV. This approach moved both same-network clusters from ESXi to AHV without requiring additional hardware and the migration was completed with no downtime for any guest VMs hosted on them. Working within a classified environmentThe classified-network was comprised of a single cluster that was too small to split and form two temporary clusters. Instead the team opted to utilize some Nutanix Edge nodes that were slated for a future project but had not yet been imaged. A temporary cluster was formed using these nodes and Nutanix Move was once again utilized to migrate all VMs to this temporary location before destroying and rebuilding the production cluster with AHV. Once the production cluster was validated healthy then all VMs were migrated back and brought back into production before destroying the temporary cluster and allowing the nodes to be utilized for their original purpose. Preparing the workloadsNutanix Move handled much of the migration preparation, including the scripts needed for the Linux-based virtual machines, and is the best supported method for ensuring VMs operate as expected on AHV. The migration was completed using the team’s knowledge of the customer’s environment and Nutanix expertise. Nutanix Professional Services and support were not required. The Solution Optiv + ClearShark recommended migrating the three ESXi clusters to Nutanix AHV to reduce virtualization costs, simplify day-to-day management and establish a unified hypervisor platform for existing and future deployments. The team used Nutanix Move, a Nutanix migration appliance designed to move virtual machines from ESXi to AHV, to execute the conversions. For the two clusters on the same network, workloads were temporarily consolidated onto one cluster while the other was rebuilt with AHV and the required AOS versions. Once validated, workloads were migrated back to the rebuilt cluster. The team then repeated the process with the remaining cluster. Industry Served: Federal Government Challenges VMware/Broadcom licensing changes created increased costs and prompted the customer to reevaluate its ESXi environment Three existing ESXi clusters required migration to a new hypervisor, including one operating on a classified network The customer needed to maintain availability and protect critical workloads throughout the migration The classified environment lacked an additional cluster to temporarily host workloads during the conversion Customer’s Success Successfully migrated all three ESXi clusters to Nutanix AHV Experienced no downtime during migration of the two primary-network clusters Experienced minimal downtime during migration of the classified-network cluster Experienced no data loss, with all virtual machines operating as expected following migration Established a unified hypervisor environment to support future Nutanix deployments Completed the migration without requiring Nutanix Professional Services or support Next Steps Continue standardizing future infrastructure deployments on Nutanix AHV Leverage the unified AHV environment as additional clusters are deployed Reuse the Nutanix EDGE hardware for its originally intended purpose following completion of the migration Image Download a printable version of this case study Download Case Study Share: