The High Stakes of Complex VMware Migrations
As the pressure builds to migrate off VMware, many enterprises can grapple with the scale and complexity of their existing environments. The stakes are high, especially for those with sprawling infrastructures, legacy applications, and critical business operations.
Whether driven by support concerns, cost increases, or product uncertainties, enterprises cannot tolerate missteps when moving to a new platform like Nutanix. Yet without the right planning, even a well-intentioned migration can result in service outages, frustrated stakeholders, lost productivity, and delayed ROI. Fortunately, by implementing the right migration tools – Nutanix Move and Ascend, powered by ReadyWorks - complexity is reduced, and downtime can be avoided.
Understanding Enterprise VMware complexity
Modern enterprise IT environments aren’t built for rapid change. They’ve evolved gradually, and often nobody fully knows what is supported. A typical VMware estate may include:
- Dozens or hundreds of clusters spread across global sites.
- A mix of virtual machines, containers, and even bare-metal applications.
- Siloed or outdated inventories across disparate systems.
- Multiple stakeholders with fragmented ownership over workloads.
This complexity becomes a liability during migration. Without clear visibility of what’s supported, who or where the owners and users are, or how critical assets are to the business, even simple moves can spiral into major disruptions.
Why Downtime Happens: Common Pitfalls in Complex Migrations
Despite the good intentions of those managing them, many migrations encounter roadblocks that put business continuity at risk. Some of the most common causes include:
- Unknown or missed interdependencies between systems and applications leading to unexpected breakages.
- Poor scheduling, meaning migrations move ahead during critical business periods.
- Unclear ownership, leading to delayed approvals and execution.
- Lack of validation as cutover goes ahead without confirmation of data accuracy, readiness, or rollback paths.
These issues stall progress, impact stakeholder and worker trust, and increase costs.
Best Practices to Maintain Business Continuity During Your VMware Migration
Best practices to avoid downtime during your enterprise migration include:
- Accurate Dependency Mapping – You must be aware of the dependencies between all assets to map your migration path accurately.
- Wave Planning – You should be able to identify and populate waves based on factors including business criticality, complexity, and risk.
- Pre-Migration Checks – Migration readiness must be assessed using accurate real-time data and confirmed with the correct owners/stakeholders.
- Automated Scheduling – Migrations must be aligned with critical business periods and maintenance windows.
- Live Monitoring and Rollback Plans – Dynamic oversight and contingency readiness are vital to mitigate issues should they occur.
By applying these principles, organizations can increase speed and precision without sacrificing control.
Tackling Complex Environments with Precision using ReadyWorks
Ascend is powered by the ReadyWorks platform, which was designed to address exactly these types of challenges. It elevates Nutanix Move to simplify every step of the migration journey by allowing you to:
- Connect to all relevant systems, including Nutanix Prism, Nutanix Move, & VMware vCenter for clear visibility of your existing VMware estate.
- Normalize and unify your data, resolving conflicts automatically using pre-defined data quality scoring.
- Benefit from automatically mapped dependencies and intelligent analytics to identify risks early in the process.
- Poll owners and stakeholders automatically, reducing email back-and-forth and accelerating decision-making.
- Schedule your migration based on rules and readiness, ensuring it proceeds only when all systems and stakeholders are good to go.
- Automate migration waves based on any criteria.
- Track and report migration status centrally across real-time dashboards to manage waves, systems, and status, and share progress with stakeholders.
This approach removes reliance on static spreadsheets, outdated inventories, and manual processes. It provides the confidence and structure required to execute enterprise-scale migrations without compromising operations.
Complexity Demands Coordination, Not Chaos
Migration isn’t just about moving workloads, it’s about moving them safely, intelligently, and without business disruption. Using Nutanix Move alongside Ascend, powered by ReadyWorks, enterprises can navigate their complex VMware-to-Nutanix migration with confidence.
In a world where downtime costs more than ever, ReadyWorks ensures your migration is more than fast—it’s smart, structured, and successful!
See how ReadyWorks with Nutanix Move will assist your VMware-to-Nutanix migration.
