The Situation 

We were engaged via a leading technology company to provide structure, guidance and on the ground resources to support one of their key customer accounts, a major global business process software provider with a rationalisation and migration of decades of layered technical complexity. 

The customer had significantly grown over the years by means of acquisition but had failed to maintain a common operational framework or technical consistency, resulting in a business impacting lack of agility to react to market demands and business requirements. 

• Constrained by lack of ability to invest and agility to transform. 
• Being eroded by more agile modernised competition. 
• 450,000 devices, spread across many globally located datacenters. 
• Over 25 independent lines of business all operating independently. 

The Task 

Assist the customer to rationalise existing datacenters and help them achieve their strategic objects so that they could start to freely consume services from multiple Hyperscalers 

• The customer had a clear strategy which required the consolidation of their 50+ datacenters into 20 global datacenters while having burst capacity in all the major hyperscalers. 
• Create a standardised and scalable target solution, from which they could scale out. 
• Develop and validate target blueprints for Amazon AWS Azure VMware Solution (AVS) and Google Cloud VMware Environment GCVE). 
• Be positioned to rapidly consume AVS and GVCE as business requirements demand. 

• Focus on portability of applications and workloads.  

The Action 

Re-platform one of the critical lines of business into Microsoft Azure, running AVS (Azure VMware Solutions) 

• Developed a “cookie cutter” methodology that could be applied to all the organisation’s 100,000+ customers from discovery, communications, and cutover approach. 
• Proof of concept (PoC) against key line of business and most pressing business 
• We needed to be able to support project level tasks across customer and multiple 3rd party vendors 
  

The re-platforming process we implemented: 

1. Clone the production application 
2. Reconfigure the VMs with new UUIDs, IPs and hostnames 
3. Migrate over to Microsoft Azure AVS using VMware HCX bulk migration 
4. Clone the production NFS volumes over to AVS using CloudSync 
5. Remount NFS volumes to newly cloned applications & validate application health 
6. Proceed with end-customer testing 
7. Once end-customer confirms UAT complete, schedule cutover event 
8. Destroy cloned NFS, Clone updated NFS volumes to AVS in preparation for production use 
9. Remount updated NFS volumes 
10. Copy over any updated application code / databases 
11. Commit global DNS updates 
12. Retire legacy application 

The Result 

Enablement of the business transformation agenda and underlying technology strategy 

• There were predictable outcomes for each line of business and supporting technology transformation 
• Demonstrated a repeatable process for live transformation across critical services 
• Made the transformation process invisible to the end customer 
• Executed the development of multi-year roadmap 
• Confirmation of all parties live on new environment with no issues