A major project to ditch VMware's hypervisor and move to Microsoft Hyper-V helped Melbourne-based Enpire save "tens of thousands" of dollars and has now opened an opportunity to offer the same service to other IT solution providers.
Enspire began migrating approximately 500 virtual machines from VMware's vSphere hypervisor to Microsoft late last year, driven by the cost savings offered by Hyper-V, Enspire client enablement manager Steve Karro wrote in a blog post.
Enspire director Mark Eckert explained that the savings were delivered thanks to Microsoft's bundled licensing approach as opposed to VMware's per-gigabyte pricing. "That can be quite expensive. They have a sliding scale," said Eckert, who called VMware "hellishly more expensive than Microsoft".
The move to Hyper-V, which commenced late last year and comprised "400-500" VMs, has also helped Enspire remain an attractive option against Microsoft's own Azure public cloud, said Eckert.
Microsoft had already selected Enspire to deploy its Azure provisioning portal over the private cloud environment. "Now we get the benefit of their provisioning and orchestration over our infrastructure and present an Azure-like interface for our users.
"For us, it means we are not spending hundreds of hours developing orchestration portals for a relatively small number of clients – we are not Azure – now it becomes feasible to run that orchestration platform because you constantly get updates from Azure."
Eckert said the Microsoft-designed interface meant Enspire's private cloud "looks like Azure, so for all intents and purposes, it could be Azure to them [customers] – they wouldn't know the difference."
He added: "Our pricing is competitive with Azure – cheaper than Azure."
Figuring out how to migrate virtual machines in production from one hypervisor to the other wasn't easy. It required a combination of a SAN hardware appliance, software and internal R&D to create a seamless process, and Eckert is keeping this intellectual property close to his chest.
Asked for more detail, Eckert said: "I can't tell you that." He dubbed this the Enspire Migration Device, and said it was "the special ingredient" in the migration service that Enspire is now pitching to the channel.
Customers don't care
Eckert said customers largely did not care which hypervisor underlaid their IT. "Unless you are dealing with an in-house IT team, who might be biased, then you have to go into that details where you compare features and pricing, but otherwise clients are only interested in, 'What is it going to cost and will it work?'"
The private cloud is running in Enspire's sister business, Melbourne Data Centre (MDC), of which Eckert is also a director. The facility is based in on Collins St in central Melbourne, once home to the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) data centre. This is a selling point for customers based in the Victorian capital.
"They have moved from on-prem to a cloud environment but instead of the public cloud, it is private cloud on our platform. They have some degree of confidence they know where that data is, and have some visibility – it's not just numbers in the cloud, they can walk up to the environment. They can take a tour of MDC."
Enspire customers can also host bare metal infrastructure side by side with the virtualised environment, another selling point, said Eckert. "Because we have a data centre, say an AS/400 or some environment that can't be virtualised, we can put it in a rack next door and run an ethernet cable. You can't do that in AWS or Azure."
The migration project was not without its complications, though. After reporting its first-ever zero usage balance to VMware distributor Rhipe, Enspire learned that its licensing contract meant the company had to report a minimum usage for another six months.
VMware still outpaces Microsoft in terms of broad compatibility for operating systems, and not all Enspire's customer workloads were compatible with Hyper-V. "We did have a couple of technical limitations on servers that were Linux-based, which weren't supported by Hyper-V so we had to support the client in an upgrade strategy," said Eckert.
Clients had to upgrade to a newer version of Ubuntu if they wanted to remain managed by Enspire. "We are retiring our VMware platform. We are not going to run both. It is cost-prohibitive," added Eckert.
There were also compatiblity benefits with the broader Microsoft stack, wrote Karro. "So when we think about everything around a virtual machine, such as backup, disaster recovery, firewalls, co-location, growing or moving infrastructure, the fact that we were effectively dealing with a single platform made things so much more simple.
"This fact also avoided a lot of extra costs for additional modules that are all part of the Hyper-V or Windows Server architecture that it all sits on. Additionally, this helps to integrate with Azure for everything from storage to backup and replication," Karro wrote.
The learnings meant the Enspire team would "almost say we are experts in this exact type of project", according to Karro.
"If you’re thinking about the challenge of a VMware to Hyper-V conversion and it seems too big to even consider, let us show you why it’s worth making the change now."
Pictured: Mark Eckert, Enspire
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