Virtualization, Private Cloud & VMware Migration Services
Licence costs that do not triple every renewal. Proxmox VE, Ceph, KubeVirt and OpenStack, with a migration plan that includes a tested way back.
What this usually looks like
Your virtualisation renewal arrived with a number your CFO will not approve, and the alternatives all sound like a science project.
- Renewal cost growth is outpacing the value you get from the platform.
- You are locked into a hypervisor whose roadmap you cannot influence.
- The migration sounds possible, but nobody can promise the workloads come back up.
- Half the estate runs VMs, half runs containers, and they have separate teams and separate budgets.
Three ways to buy this
Audit if you want to know how bad it is. Build if you have the team and want the capability. Managed if you don't want to own the pager. Most engagements start with the audit and decide afterwards.
Audit
A fixed-price health check — the cheapest way in
- Workload inventory and migration wave planning
- Licence cost comparison, including the numbers your CFO will ask for
- Storage and compute sizing for the replacement platform
- Risk and rollback assessment for each migration wave
Build
One-off delivery: design, code, hardening, handover
- Proxmox VE clusters with Ceph hyperconverged storage
- Harvester (Kubernetes-native HCI) for container-and-VM hybrid estates
- KubeVirt + CDI for running VMs inside Kubernetes alongside containers
- OpenStack (Kolla-Ansible) where a full private cloud API is required
- Migration pipeline: assess, batch-migrate, validate, roll back
- Nested virtualisation, PCI passthrough, and vGPU configuration where needed
Managed
Build plus 7×24 on-call, SLA and quarterly drills
- Node and Ceph lifecycle management
- Backup policy with tested restores of VM images
- Capacity and growth review
- Quarterly upgrade windows coordinated with your change calendar
What we actually deploy
Specific tooling, not categories. If a version matters to your decision, ask — we will tell you which one we would pick and why, including when the answer is the older one.
Hypervisors
- Proxmox VE 8.x
- XCP-ng
- oVirt / OLVM
- KVM + libvirt with manual management
- Xen (legacy)
- ESXi (audit and migration only)
Hyperconverged
- Proxmox VE + Ceph
- Harvester
- Nutanix (migration target evaluation)
- VMware vSAN (audit and exit planning)
Private cloud
- OpenStack (Kolla-Ansible, Yoga–Caracal)
- OpenNebula
- Apache CloudStack
- Incus / LXD
VM-in-Kubernetes
- KubeVirt
- CDI
- virt-operator
- Containerized Data Importer
- OpenShift Virtualization
Migration tooling
- virt-v2v
- virt-p2v
- qemu-img conversion
- Veeam (where licensed)
- rsync + snapshot workflows
- Proxmox import of VMDK/OVA
Networking & storage for VMs
- Linux bridge / OVS / VXLAN
- vGPU (NVIDIA vGPU, SR-IOV)
- PCI passthrough
- Ceph RBD
- NFS / iSCSI datastores
What we will be measured on
These are the numbers we put in the delivery report. If we cannot measure it, we do not promise it.
- A licence cost comparison table with real renewal figures — the document your CFO asked for.
- Each migration wave validated with a tested rollback before the next wave starts.
- Measured migration window and measured business interruption, reported honestly.
- VM performance validated against the pre-migration baseline, not assumed equivalent.
- Backup and restore of the new platform proven by an actual restore.
What we would build, and where the weak point is
Every migration plan without a rehearsed rollback is a bet, not a plan. The rollback capability determines the safe size of your first wave — not the vendor's migration wizard.
marks a single point of failure we would raise with you rather than hide. Every architecture has one; the question is whether you know where it is.
What we don't do
Every vendor says yes to everything. Here is where our answer is no, or where someone else needs to be in the room. If this list looks wrong for your situation, tell us — we would rather argue about scope before the contract than after.
- Requires partner
Broadcom/VMware licence negotiation on your behalf
We give you accurate cost modelling and technical exit options. Negotiating your enterprise agreement is your procurement team's job.
- Out of scope
Running production workloads on unvalidated hardware
We validate against your actual server models, NICs and storage. We will not deploy blind and fix it in production.
- Out of scope
Desktop VDI and thin-client estates
Server virtualisation only. VDI has different economics and different tooling; we would be learning on your budget.
- Requires partner
Migrating without application-owner sign-off
We need an accountable application owner per wave. Migrating systems nobody will validate is how outages get scheduled.
What it looked like last time
A 140-VM estate facing a renewal increase: migrated in four waves to Proxmox VE + Ceph with a rehearsed rollback for each wave, no unplanned downtime, and a demonstrated licence cost reduction reported in a comparison table the customer could take to their board.
Anonymised under NDA. No client names, no logos, no invented metrics. Full case library on the work page.
Talk to the virtualisation engineer about your virtualization & hci
Send us the architecture, or just describe what broke most recently. You'll get an engineer's answer, not a discovery questionnaire.
Talk to a virtualisation engineer: botonwa@gmail.com · +86 130 5181 3099