PLANNING YOUR MIGRATION
If you are planning a large hypervisor migration, you already know the tools are not the hard part. The real challenge is keeping scope, risk, and approvals under control while dozens of teams try to move at once. That is often the moment buyers start looking for a VM Accelerator that can pull the whole program together.
Most teams do not lack data. They lack one place to see it, govern it, and turn it into a realistic migration plan. A good VM Accelerator should feel less like a one off utility and more like a migration orchestration tool that can support multiple waves, platforms, and business cases over time.
This guide walks through the outcomes you should expect, the evaluation criteria that matter, and a practical way to compare options. By the end you will have a clear scorecard and an ROI ready one page business case you can take into governance reviews with confidence.
WHAT IS A VM ACCELERATOR
At its core, a VM Accelerator is a software platform that helps you plan, coordinate, and track virtual machine migrations across sites, hypervisors, and business units. It connects to your existing tools, builds a clean inventory, groups workloads into realistic bundles, and automates the workflows around migration, rollback, and reporting.
Key evaluation criteria:
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Connector coverage for your discovery, ticketing, and monitoring tools
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Workflow automation for approvals, cutovers, and rollback
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Dashboards for scope, risk, and progress
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Security controls for access, audit, and multitenancy
Different vendors may focus on different stages. Some behave more like a VM migration tool, tightly focused on a single target stack. Others act as a broader hypervisor migration tool that you can reuse across multiple transitions.
CORE OUTCOMES TO EXPECT
Before you compare feature lists, decide what outcomes you need in the first 90 days. A VM Accelerator that looks impressive in a demo but cannot deliver quick, measurable gains will stall out in governance.
TIME TO VALUE
Time to value is the first filter. A good platform should let you:
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Connect to your core systems in days, not months
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Normalize inventory across vCenters, clouds, and discovery tools
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Build initial migration bundles that reflect how you actually deploy
You want to see useful views within the first two weeks. That includes bundle definitions, early risk flags, and a draft migration roadmap. If your team cannot show these deliverables quickly, the tool will struggle to win support from finance and leadership.
Tie this directly to your ROI one page business case. On that single page, show how faster scoping, better bundling, and fewer failed cutovers translate into reduced project duration, lower weekend burn, and less contractor spend.
RISK AND ROLLBACK CONTROL
Migrations do not fail because a button was pressed in the wrong console. They fail because risk was invisible until it was too late to adjust the plan. Your VM migration accelerator should make risk visible early and keep rollback as a designed path, not a last-minute scramble.
Look for:
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Explicit rollback plans at the bundle or wave level
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Pre cutover checks that validate health, dependencies, and back out paths
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The ability to pause, reschedule, or split bundles when signals turn red
Teams should be able to answer a simple question at any time: which workloads are ready, which are blocked, and what is the cost of proceeding anyway.
VISIBILITY AND REPORTING
Executives and stakeholders will not live in the tool. They will ask for simple, recurring updates. If your platform cannot provide these cleanly, you will spend nights rebuilding status decks instead of managing risk.
At minimum, expect:
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A single view of scope: what is in, what is out, and why
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Trend lines for remediation work, cutover success, and rollback counts
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Drill down views by site, business unit, and application owner
Centralized monitoring and reporting should reduce the hours spent reconciling spreadsheets and tickets. That time goes straight into your ROI case.
EVALUATION CRITERIA
Once you know your outcomes, you can build a structured matrix. The sections below map directly to columns you can score on a 1 to 5 scale as you compare VM Accelerator options.
Connector coverage and integration depth
A migration platform lives or dies by its connections. If it cannot see reality, it cannot orchestrate it.
KEY QUESTIONS:
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Does it connect natively to your CMDB, discovery tools, hypervisors, clouds, ticketing, and CI pipelines?
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Are those connectors read only, or can they also open, update, and close records where it makes sense?
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Can it act as a lightweight integration and iPaaS layer, or does it depend on a separate iPaaS tool for every workflow?
You want depth, not just a logo slide. A strong platform behaves as a practical migration automation hub that can pull in live data, push updates to systems of record, and avoid point to point scripting wherever possible.
Centralized integration and monitoring simplifies operations and reduces cost to deliver. Every script you do not have to write or maintain is future risk and effort removed from the program.
Monitoring and alerting capabilities
Your existing monitoring tools already watch infrastructure and applications. The question is whether your VM Accelerator can consume those signals and turn them into migration decisions.
BE ON THE LOOKOUT FOR:
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Support for ingesting health and performance data per workload, bundle, and site
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Simple rules to flag workloads that should not move yet based on alerts or SLO breaches
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Notification paths to the right owners when a bundle slips, risk increases, or a cutover exceeds its window
The goal is not to replace your monitoring stack. It is to route the right alerts into the migration context so that decisions are grounded in live service health, not static spreadsheets.
WORKFLOW AUTOMATION AND APPROVALS
Complex migrations live inside approvals, checklists, and handoffs. If your vm accelerator cannot model these steps, you will end up managing them by email and chat.
Consider:
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Can you define reusable workflows for assessment, remediation, pre cutover checks, cutover, validation, and rollback?
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Are approvals configurable at bundle or wave level, including CAB steps and business owner sign off?
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Can you track who approved what, when, and under which conditions?
This is where the platform should shine as a migration orchestration tool. It should handle path variations, branching logic, and exceptions without forcing your team to hard code every scenario.
Governance teams will care deeply about this section. Use your one-page page business case to show how automated approvals and consistent workflows reduce audit findings, change failures, and rework.
SECURITY, AUDITING, AND MULTITENANCY NEEDS
Security and compliance leaders will look at the tool from a different angle. They need confidence that it will not introduce new risk as it gains access to inventory, tickets, and scripts.
Questions to ask:
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How is access controlled? Do you have fine grained roles that match your operational model?
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Are actions logged in a way that satisfies your audit requirements?
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Can the platform support multitenancy if you are a service provider or a central IT team serving multiple business units?
For service providers, multitenancy is critical. You should be able to give each customer or business unit their own view, data boundaries, and workflows while reusing the same integrations and patterns behind the scenes.
A hypervisor migration tool that cannot satisfy security and audit teams will not get past procurement, no matter how strong the feature set looks to engineering.
BUILD VS BUY CONSIDERATIONS
Some teams consider building their own migration automation layer on top of existing ITSM and iPaaS investments. In limited, one off scenarios, that can work. For broad, multi year modernization, the tradeoffs are sharper.
Building usually means:
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Custom integrations that must be maintained whenever an upstream tool changes
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One off workflows that reflect the current program manager’s style, not a reusable pattern
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Limited reporting that depends on whoever has time to update dashboards
Buying a mature VM Accelerator gives you:
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A tested data model for workloads, bundles, waves, and approvals
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Prebuilt connectors that track vendor changes and new APIs
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Opinionated but flexible workflows you can tailor rather than invent from scratch
The right way to compare is not hours of engineering effort alone. Use your ROI one page template to compare the cost of building and maintaining a custom solution over three to five years against the subscription and adoption curve of a commercial platform.
DOWNLOAD THE SCORECARD AND NEXT STEPS
The easiest way to keep your evaluation grounded is to use a shared scorecard and governance process from the start.
Here is a simple path your team can follow this month:
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Draft your one page business case that covers scope, expected savings, and key risks.
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Define outcomes for the first 90 days and map them to the criteria in this guide.
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Use the buyer scorecard to rate each VM Accelerator on integration depth, workflows, monitoring, security, and usability.
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Run a time boxed proof of value with two or three candidate platforms using real workloads, not synthetic examples.
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Present results, tradeoffs, and a recommendation back to your governance board.
When used well, a VM Accelerator becomes a long term asset for modernization, not just a one time migration utility. It centralizes the moving parts, keeps governance honest, and gives you a repeatable pattern for future programs.
VM ACCELERATOR FAQ
What features define a VM Accelerator?
A VM Accelerator should centralize inventory, risk, workflows, and reporting for VM migrations. It connects to your existing tools, organizes workloads into bundles, automates approvals and cutovers, and provides clear dashboards for scope, progress, and rollback.
How do I measure ROI for migration tools?
Start with time saved on discovery, scoping, and reporting, then add reductions in failed changes, weekend overrun, and contractor or overtime costs. Use a simple one page model that compares program cost and risk with and without a dedicated vm accelerator over the life of the migration.
What integrations matter most in VM migration?
Prioritize integrations with your hypervisors and clouds, CMDB and discovery tools, ITSM and change management systems, and key monitoring platforms. These are the systems that hold the data and approvals your migration orchestration tool needs to keep plans accurate and risk controlled.
ONE NEXT STEP
Try out the ReadyWorks VM Accelerator for yourself with a free 45-day trial. Learn more here.
