Anexia moves 12,000 VMs off VMware to homebrew KVM platform

12,000 virtual machines, one provider, no noticeable downtime for customers. When Broadcom changed the licensing terms for VMware, Anexia had to act quickly—and decided to go its own way instead of sticking with the existing contract.

A cloud provider with thousands of customer VMs suddenly faces a choice: accept significantly higher licensing costs or rebuild its own platform. At Anexia, following Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, the decision was made to opt out of the existing contract. The reason: new payment terms that the Austrian technology company was unwilling to accept.

We have funds available to work on the open-source solution.

– Alexander Windbichler, Anexia Group CEO

The deciding factor was an in-house resource: netcup, an Anexia subsidiary that was already running on the open-source KVM hypervisor. The development team used this foundation to build a migration tool that moved customers to the new platform with a single click—without any noticeable downtime for running workloads. This also affected business-critical applications of international customers such as TeamViewer and Lufthansa.

Within a few months, the entire project was successfully completed, and 12,000 VMs were migrated to an open-source platform.

Here you can find the original article: The Register