Licensing position
Which version and edition you run, what the renewal quote actually entitles you to, and what your core count does to the new minimums.
Find out what leaving VMware costs, before you commit to it.
You have a renewal date and a quote. Deciding what to do about it requires knowing what the alternative costs — in money, in downtime, and in your own time. That is what this produces.
What we look at
Cluster and hardware
Hosts, sockets, cores, sites, and how much service life is left in the boxes you already own.
Storage layout
vSAN, fibre channel or iSCSI SAN, NFS, or local disk. Datastore layout, thin provisioning, and anything using RDMs or shared VMDKs.
Features with no direct equivalent
Whether anything you run depends on DRS, SRM, Fault Tolerance, distributed switches or NSX microsegmentation. This is usually what decides how hard the move is.
Guest estate
Operating system mix, which guests need new paravirtualised drivers, and anything pinned to a hardware version or a licence tied to the host.
Backup and recovery
Which product, which mode, whether it supports the target platform today, and whether the restore path has been tested rather than assumed.
Networking
Distributed or standard switches, VLAN and trunk layout, and what has to be rebuilt by hand rather than exported.
Undocumented dependencies
Systems other things rely on that are not written down anywhere.
What you get
Current estate
Hosts, VMs, storage, networking and dependencies, as they are rather than as documented.
Migration constraints
What blocks a move, what complicates it, and what has to be resolved before anything starts.
Workload classification
Every workload sorted by how it moves and how much it matters if it stops.
Target architecture
What the estate looks like afterwards, and why it is shaped that way.
Migration sequence
Stage by stage, with the downtime window and the rollback point for each.
Stay against move
Both costs, with the working shown, over a period you choose.
Implementation estimate
What the migration itself would take, in time and in money.
How it runs
One call, about an hour
With whoever knows the setup best, to agree scope and access.
Read-only access for five days
Or an RVTools export, if access is not practical.
We write the plan
Nothing needed from you during this.
One call to walk through it
About an hour. We take your corrections and finalise.
Final plan
Yours to keep and use however you want.
What we need from you
Read-only access, or an export
Either works. An export makes the plan slightly less detailed.
One person who knows the setup
Whoever has the clearest picture of how it is put together.
About two hours of their time
In total, spread across the ten days.
We do not run the migration for this price. If you want us to do it, we quote that separately, and the cost of the assessment comes off it.
Price
Get a priceQuestions we get asked
Which parts of our estate will not move cleanly?
That is most of what the assessment is for. The usual candidates are DRS-dependent scheduling, SRM runbooks, Fault Tolerance, NSX policy, and anything using RDMs or shared disks for clustering. We tell you which of those you actually rely on, and what the alternative looks like in each case.
What happens to our backups?
We check what your current product supports on the target platform, and what changes about the restore path. If the answer is that you need to change product, we say so in the plan rather than after you have committed.
Do our Windows guests need anything doing?
Usually paravirtualised drivers and a guest agent, which is a per-guest task rather than a per-host one. We count them and put the work in the sequence.
Can we roll back part-way through?
The plan is staged so that each stage leaves you in a working state and the previous stage is still there. We write down the rollback point for each one.
We are a small team. Is this worth it for us?
The assessment is designed primarily for estates of roughly three to twenty hosts, or ten to two hundred VMs. Under about ten VMs the decision is usually straightforward enough to make in-house. Enterprise consulting models are often uneconomical at this size, which is the gap this is built for.
Do we have to go through procurement or vendor onboarding?
We keep contracting and delivery lightweight, and can usually start without a lengthy consulting engagement. If your procurement process requires more, tell us early and we will work to it.
What if the answer is that we should stay on VMware?
Then we write that, and we say why. It happens. You end up with a documented reason for the renewal, which is worth having next time someone asks why the bill went up.
Do you resell Proxmox, or take a cut from anyone?
No. We take no commission from any vendor. Most of what we build with is open source, which is why there is usually nothing to resell — but where a commercial product you already own is the better answer, we say so.
What size setup is this for?
Roughly three to twenty hosts, or ten to two hundred VMs. Outside that range the shape of the work changes enough that this fixed scope stops being the right instrument.
How quickly can you start?
Tell us your renewal date and we will tell you honestly if we can make it.