Before starting a Virtualization Migration Assessment: A readiness framework for a successful outcome

A Virtualization Migration Assessment (VMA) is a strategic engagement designed to help organizations modernize their infrastructure. It provides a structured path for organizations looking to migrate virtualized workloads to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, offering deep visibility into the current environment and defining a clear, actionable migration plan. Learn more about how to simplify your migration.

At Red Hat Consulting, we start by validating an organization's readiness to ensure we align on expectations, migration scope, and tangible business outcomes. Based on recent field experience and insights, I’ve outlined a readiness framework to assess key factors that ensure your VMA delivers maximum impact.

1. Navigate infrastructure complexity

Infrastructure complexity isn't measured solely by the number of virtual machines (VMs). True readiness involves understanding the diversity of the environment, including multiple datacenters, heterogeneous hardware, and legacy systems.

While environments aren't inherently risky, highly fragmented ones can be. A VMA provides immediate value by creating a single source of truth, offering a realistic snapshot of the infrastructure to identify opportunities for optimization, modernization, cost savings, and consolidation, regardless of the final migration scale.

Key areas to clarify early with organizational stakeholders:

• Inspect the environment: Confirm the total number of VMs and physical sites in scope.
• Map the topology: Identify the distribution of VMs across different sites and clusters.
• Assess infrastructure standardization: Assess the level of hardware and software consistency across the fleet.
• Identify business criticality: Pinpoint workloads with high business impact and their specific dependencies.

2. Assess the OS and compatibility landscape

The distribution of operating systems (OS) across VMs represents the first technical boundary for organizations, as compatibility at the guest OS level directly impacts migration complexity. While it’s beneficial to have a high-level view of this landscape early on, Red Hat Consulting streamlines this discovery through the VMA to categorize guest OS types based on their migration complexity:

• Easy: Fully supported and straightforward
• Medium: Supported with specific constraints or involving different vendors
• Hard/Legacy: Complex environments or legacy OS versions requiring special handling

Red Hat documentation and Knowledge Base articles provide detailed, continuously updated compatibility guidance. We always use these as our primary reference to assess compatibility and supportability.

Addressing these questions with a technical lead helps us tailor the assessment strategy from Day Zero:

• Identify hypervisor diversity: How many different hypervisors are currently hosting these workloads?
• Analyze the OS mix: What is the estimated percentage of RHEL, Windows, Debian/Ubuntu, or other distributions within the VM fleet?
• Detecting legacy risks: Are there legacy OS versions in use that, for specific reasons, haven't been updated recently?

3. Evaluate storage footprint and performance expectations

Storage is one of the most critical factors influencing the feasibility and complexity of a migration, as it directly impacts migration velocity.

As a general rule, migration effort scales directly with disk size. A large storage footprint means longer data transfer windows, which significantly complicates cutover planning and maintenance windows. Without a clear view of the storage landscape, even a small number of VMs can become a major bottleneck if their disks are exceptionally large.

Furthermore, performance expectations and hardware compatibility can introduce early constraints. At this stage, the goal is not a deep-dive storage audit, but a high-level understanding to avoid mid-project surprises. For instance, heavy reliance on non-certified hardware platforms or specific proprietary storage features can represent a significant risk to a smooth migration.

Key points to align on with organizational stakeholders during Day Zero:

• Estimate total storage volume: Determine the approximate amount of storage currently in use across the entire scope.
• Identify large-scale disks: Pinpoint VMs with exceptionally large disks that will require specific migration strategies.
• Validate performance and hardware: Identify specific storage vendors, non-certified platforms, or high-IOPS requirements that might impact the target architecture.

4. Identify workload criticality

Organizations often rely on business-critical workloads that require specialized attention due to strict performance, availability, and certification requirements. Identifying these early allows us to define a technically and commercially viable scope from the very beginning.

By addressing these special cases during Day Zero, we can ensure the migration strategy is realistic and tailored to the most demanding systems.

Key actions to validate with application owners and stakeholders:

• Discover SAP environments: Determine whether SAP workloads are in scope and their overall percentage. This is essential to align on supportability and certification requirements early on.
• Assess database workloads: Estimate the number of VMs hosting databases and their typical size. Databases often have high input/output per second (IOPS) and reliability needs that directly influence the target architecture design.
• Detect high-impact systems: Identify other critical workloads with specific service level agreements (SLA) or hardware dependencies that would significantly impact the migration timeline.

5. Set the right expectations internally

The VMA serves as the foundational phase of a migration journey, designed to move modernization from a theoretical goal to a data-backed reality. It is a collaborative engagement where a team of Red Hat experts work side-by-side with the organization teams to build a technical blueprint of the environment. Together, they perform a comprehensive analysis of the infrastructure, providing strategic technical and modernization insights that address several key themes:

Informing the modernization strategy

By working closely with organizational stakeholders, our experts help identify which workloads should remain as-is, which are ready for a direct move, and which require modernization or optimization first. This proactive approach helps prevent costly decision-making errors and mitigates operational risks long before they can impact production.

Delivering infrastructure visibility

The assessment provides a data-driven snapshot of the current environment. This level of visibility, often uncovering dependencies or configurations that were previously undocumented, serves as a fundamental starting point for any future infrastructure modernization initiative, regardless of the immediate migration path.

Mitigating risk

Success isn't always a "go" signal. Sometimes, it’s the insight that saves an organization from a high-risk transition. By identifying which systems are better left as-is for now, the VMA ensures that resources remain directed toward the projects that offer the most certain path to value.

Quick readiness checklist

Before proposing a formal VMA, our approach is to validate these Day Zero pillars to ensure every engagement is structurally sound and set up for success:

• Map infrastructure scope: Confirm there is a clear map of the environment's complexity and distribution.
• Estimate workload compatibility: Perform a high-level categorization of guest OS types.
• Evaluate storage and performance: Ensure expectations for migration velocity and hardware alignment are realistic.
• Scope specialized workloads: Identify and account for critical systems like SAP or large databases.
• Ensure internal value alignment: Confirm a shared understanding that the VMA provides a realistic snapshot of the infrastructure and essential visibility for strategic risk reduction.

Conclusion

A VMA is an experience-driven framework that allows for discovery and provides value well beyond the migration itself by offering a clear, data-driven roadmap for the future. At Red Hat, our experts are committed to ensuring that every organization is truly ready to benefit from this engagement.