Beyond the hypervisor: How a service provider migrated thousands of workloads to a unified application platform

The managed services market is navigating an unprecedented inflection point: For many service providers, recent changes in virtualization licensing and vendor partner tiers have elevated costs from a standard operational challenge into an existential threat to business continuity. For highly regulated industries like financial services and healthcare, this shift is even more complex. Security, continuous uptime, and compliance mandates mean that infrastructure changes cannot risk operational stability. At Red Hat Summit 2026 Community Day in Atlanta, Georgia, Paul Ponzeka, Chief Technology Officer of Abacus, shared how his organization navigated this transition. 

Similar to how many are responding in the face of this virtualization disruption, Abacus took the opportunity to build a modern, unified hybrid cloud foundation. Featured technologies included Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Virtualization, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, and the migration toolkit for virtualization.

3 core challenges: Scalability, strict compliance, and the hypervisor tax

Abacus operates as a global managed service provider and managed security service provider. The company manages a private cloud infrastructure that supports over 4,000 virtual machines (VMs) across 4 global datacenters. Their client base includes hedge funds, private equity firms, and healthcare providers, meaning every system must comply with strict SEC, FINRA, and HIPAA regulations.

The catalyst for change came when Broadcom acquired VMware and eliminated the VMware Cloud Service Provider program, which Abacus had used since 2008. The commercial changes brought an immediate 30% price increase, with plans to eventually shrink the program by 95%. This placed Abacus on a hard deadline: migrate all 4,000 VMs to a new platform by September 2026.

This scale presented 3 distinct challenges:

1. Reusing a significant capital investment in existing SuperMicro hardware
2. Maintaining or increasing performance for roughly 90% Windows-based workloads
3. Protecting strict client disaster recovery profiles, including a 4-hour recovery SLA

The modern architecture: Escaping the find and replace trap

When planning the migration, the team initially fell into the trap of trying to find direct, tool-for-tool replacements for their legacy stack. They quickly realized this was the wrong approach. Instead of asking what tool replaced their legacy virtual center or datastores, they focused on their desired business outcomes.

This reframe led them to deploy Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization on their existing bare-metal SuperMicro hosts. This modern architecture runs VMs directly on Kubernetes, allowing the team to manage legacy VMs and modern containers side by side.

"We fell into the trap of doing a find-and-replace on our legacy stack, asking what is the equivalent of this tool or that datastore," Ponzeka explained. "We had to stop and realize this is not just a platform swap, but a complete shift in how we think about infrastructure."

When building out this hybrid cloud foundation, the team realized that defining the storage topology was their most important priority. They made key physical infrastructure changes to support the new deployment:

• Transitioning to hyperconverged storage: Centralized, LUN-based storage hit physical limits quickly, and iSCSI became a major network bottleneck even at 25Gb. Ponzeka emphasized this lesson: "If there is one thing we learned, it is that storage is your number-one architectural decision. Centralized, LUN-based storage hit limits instantly. Moving to a software-defined layer on top of our arrays was the breakthrough that actually unlocked zero-downtime live migrations." To resolve this, Abacus deployed Portworx by Everpure as a software-defined storage layer on top of their Everpure (formerly Pure Storage) arrays. This resolved network bottlenecks, allowing automated asynchronous volume-level replication across datacenters, integrated snapshots, and live migrations of persistent volume claims without downtime.
• Upgrading the network fabric: OpenShift hosts required more physical connections. The team upgraded from 4 10Gb ports per host in VMware to 8 25Gb ports in OpenShift, connecting directly to Cisco Nexus core switches. They also segmented worker nodes from control plane nodes to handle the high network throughput.

Figure 1. Abacus, choosing Red Hat OpenShift

The execution blueprint: Mitigating migration risks with automation

Migrating over 4,000 VMs under a tight deadline required a structured, repeatable process. Abacus used the migration toolkit for virtualization, a built-in Red Hat OpenShift operator that manages VM conversion, network remapping, and storage binding.

To protect active clients from performance degradation during the move, the team established dedicated migration hosts within VMware. These hosts acted as isolated source endpoints, keeping migration traffic separate from active production workloads and eliminating noisy neighbor issues.

The true engine of the migration was Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. Custom playbooks automated the entire end-to-end pipeline, including:

• Executing pre-migration environmental checks
• Tagging virtual machines and batching them into migration waves
• Running post-migration validation checks to confirm network and storage settings

By automating these steps, the team removed manual effort and significantly reduced the risk of human error.

Concrete business outcomes: Unexpected opportunities

By completing this migration, the company achieved platform modernization. They now run their VMs on a modern, hybrid cloud application platform that delivers lower CPU overhead and reduced latency compared to their legacy hypervisor.

The transition also unlocked unexpected business opportunities. With Red Hat OpenShift, they were able to build an entirely new Kubernetes-as-a-service product line with containers, expanding flexibility with their customers. Additionally, they are now deploying GPU-enabled hardware to support on-premises AI compute workloads for regulated financial and healthcare clients who must maintain strict data residency.

Hard-won lessons for infrastructure leaders

For organizations preparing to undertake their own virtualization migration, the team shared three key takeaways:

• Windows workloads require deep, proactive planning: Because roughly 90% of Abacus's VMs are Windows, the team learned that the wider Kubernetes partner ecosystem is heavily Linux-native. While Windows VM support is robust in Red Hat OpenShift, third-party partner tooling, documentation, and operator support can lag behind, requiring organizations to evaluate partner ecosystems carefully and prepare to fill operational gaps manually.
• Invest in engineer upskilling: Moving from a hypervisor-centric view to a Kubernetes-native framework is a major mindset change. Ponzeka noted that organizations cannot treat this transition lightly: "Moving from a VMware-centric view to a Kubernetes-native framework is a major mental hurdle. It is not a weekend course or a quick read. You have to actively invest in training, run labs, and give your engineers the runway to truly learn how to manage this environment." Organizations must invest in formal training and certification paths to help their teams succeed.
• Engage an integration partner early: Trying to solve architectural challenges through trial and error slows down progress. Abacus engaged with TEKsystems, an experienced Red Hat Specialized Partner, during the initial design phase, which saved weeks of troubleshooting.

Get started

Are you ready to migrate your virtualized workloads to a modern hybrid cloud platform? Explore these resources to get started:

• Learn more about their story: Abacus was featured in the OpenShift Spotlight
• Generate an automated migration readiness report: Instantly evaluate the migration readiness of your VMware workloads with the no-cost OpenShift migration advisor
• Download the Architecture Guide: Access step-by-step instructions, architectural blueprints, and best practices moving to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization
• Explore with Interactive Demos: See Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization in action and learn how to manage virtual machines and containers from a single, unified console