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Red Hat infrastructure migration FAQ

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INTRODUCTION

Combining open source technology, consulting services, and learning subscriptions, the Red Hat® Infrastructure Migration solution allows customers to migrate from expensive proprietary virtualization infrastructures to modern, flexible alternatives in a safe and methodical manner. Organizations extricate themselves from long-term contracts and realize significant savings, allowing for the accelerated adoption of transformational technologies such as container technology, increased automation, andmulticloud management. Complexity is also significantly reduced, as the new streamlined infrastructure helps eliminate decades of technical debt, accumulated inadvertently over the years with overlapping technologies, long-forgotten requirements, and “good enough” architectures.

The savings from this migration effort are often significant. These extricated funds can then be redirected to strategic digital transformation, ultimately allowing for increases in customer affinity, competitive advantage, and market share.

QUESTION: How does the Red Hat infrastructure migration solution lower costs?  

ANSWER: The solution reduces costs by analyzing the cost of the existing infrastructure and providing an alternative open virtualization platform for both new growth and existing workloads. New workloads can be delivered on the open platform in an automated fashion with self-service, ensuring IT can quickly recreate the workloads on future platforms, such as public cloud or private clouds, without a heavy burden. Existing workloads are then analyzed and migrated using a proven methodology to ensure all business requirements are satisfied, such as migrating within proper change control windows and gaining necessary stakeholder approvals.

With the infrastructure migration solution, organizations can escape proprietary vendor lock-in and substantially reduce costs with an open virtualization platform. In addition, organizations can increase capacity to host workloads and accelerate transformational projects, such as the use of container technology, automation, or multicloud management.

QUESTION: How does the
Red Hat infrastructure migration reduce complexity?

ANSWER: The new streamlined infrastructure helps eliminate decades of technical debt, accumulated inadvertently over the years with overlapping technologies, long-forgotten requirements, and “good enough” architectures.

QUESTION: Have you implemented this solution for other customers?

ANSWER:Intermountain Healthcare is an example of one customer who has benefited from Red Hat’s infrastructure migration solution.

Intermountain Healthcare, a not-for-profit health system, consists of 1,400 physicians at 22 hospitals and over 185 clinics in the western United States. The organization used proprietary hardware and software that added licensing and other IT costs and made it prohibitive for the organization to launch new, innovative patient services. When its virtualization and server provisioning licensing agreement was due to end, Intermountain sought a more agile, flexible solution that would simplify its IT environment and reduce costs.

With the cost savings achieved through the migration, Intermountain Healthcare was able to implement a container platform and increase its automation and management capabilities. These investments in transformational projects have accelerated the organization’s development of cloud-native applications and adoption of DevOps methodology.

QUESTION: What steps are necessary for success?

ANSWER: For any migration, there are three primary phases for success:

  1. Planning and platform setup. This phase includes defining the architecture for the alternative platform and operationalizing it. This aspect also includes identifying and characterizing virtual machines that should be migrated.
  2. Migration tooling and approach. This phase includes configuring the necessary tools and automation to support migrating workloads in a consistent and controlled manner and ensuring that all business and technical requirements are met. For example, organizations should determine who must approve the migration, when migrations are allowed to take place, and how the process will be audited.
  3. Migration execution. A pilot migration of several representative workloads should take place to ensure success before moving on to a larger-scale migration of the remaining workloads.

QUESTION: How does Red Hat Implement these phases for a successful migration?

ANSWER: A typical Red Hat migration journey has several phases:

  1. Red Hat Consulting discovery session. In this collaborative phase, Red Hat Consulting engages with your organization in a complimentary session to fully understand and document the scope of the migration journey.
  2. Migration pilot. Working closely with Red Hat Consulting, the alternative platform is deployed and operationalized, and several pilot migrations take place to ensure all requirements are met for a larger-scale migration.
  3. Migration at scale. In this phase, customers begin migrating workloads at scale, empowered by the documentation and best practices created collaboratively in the previous two phases.

QUESTION: Can you tell me more about the Red Hat Consulting discovery session?

ANSWER: The discovery session phase focuses on understanding the challenges and opportunities and generating the future vision for the organization. While the session is led by Red Hat Consulting, many stakeholders from the customer should participate to ensure that the session is successful. The output of the discovery session is a high-level architecture and documented plan for the migration. The session typically takes one to two days and the output is provided to the customer shortly afterward.

QUESTION: What happens in the next phase, the migration pilot?

ANSWER: In this phase, the output from the discovery session, as well as subsequent planning sessions, is used to install, configure, and operationalize the alternative platform. During the migration pilot, common management tasks required by the customer can be learned, performed, and documented. Also, workloads on the existing platform are cataloged and prioritized for migration. An approach to the migration is designed and validated by Red Hat’s principal consultant and the customer’s virtualization and migration team leads. Finally, the customer performs several migrations with Red Hat’s principal consultant. Any issues are corrected to ensure that they do not adversely affect migrations at scale. It should be noted that prior to this phase, it is recommended that customers utilize Red Hat Learning Subscriptions to obtain training on the alternative platform technologies, such as Red Hat Virtualization, Red Hat OpenStack® Platform, Red Hat CloudForms®, and Red Hat Ansible® Automation.

QUESTION: What happens in the final phase, migration at scale?

ANSWER: In this phase, the customer follows the plan and best practices established during the migration pilot. Using the skills acquired through mentoring and formal training, the customer migrates workloads at scale to the alternative platform. If further support is required, the customer may contact Red Hat’s Customer Experience and Engagement (CE&E) team or Red Hat Services.

QUESTION: How do I get started?

ANSWER: We recommend that you start by using our complimentary virtual machine (VM) cost calculator at: red.ht/vm-cost. It helps you determine if your organization is a good candidate for the infrastructure migration solution, and it provides a rough estimate of potential savings. The cost calculator asks you several brief questions then instantly generates a customized summary—the whole process requires less than two minutes of your time.

The next step is a discovery session. Led by Red Hat Consulting, this one- to two-day session focuses on understanding the challenges and opportunities of your organization and generating a future vision. The output of the discovery session is a high-level architecture and documented migration plan that can be used to make a decision on how best to proceed.

To contact Red Hat Consulting to set up a discovery session, visit: https://www.redhat.com/en/services/consulting.

QUESTION: What does the solution provide?

ANSWER: The solution provides an eight-week services engagement. During these eight weeks, architects, consultants, and project managers work together to operationalize the Red Hat Virtualization platform and migrate a predetermined set of workloads from the existing virtualization platform.

The solution also provides migration capabilities—using Red Hat CloudForms—that allow users to map compute, network, and storage from existing proprietary virtualization to Red Hat Virtualization and create and execute migration plans that include virtual machines discovered by CloudForms. Finally, the solution provides access to Red Hat Virtualization or Red Hat OpenStack Platform as an alternative platform for virtual machines.

QUESTION: What software products come with the solution?

ANSWER: The infrastructure migration solution includes Red Hat CloudForms, Red Hat Ansible Automation, and either Red Hat Virtualization or Red Hat OpenStack Platform, depending on the desired destination platform.

QUESTION: Can any other service or support offering be leveraged with this solution?

ANSWER: Some customers opt for additional support from a Red Hat product expert by adding a Technical Account Manager (TAM) to assist with their migration effort. TAMs will help solve issues quickly and ensure a smooth experience for customers through proactive guidance and support.

QUESTION: What is the price of the solution?

ANSWER: For pricing information, visit: www.redhat.com/en/contact-sales.