Why the virtualization decision keeps getting deferred

If double-paying during a platform transition is stalling your virtualization migration, removing that first-year cost overlap can get your project moving again.

Most infrastructure teams I speak with have spent the best part of 2 years working out what to do about their virtualization platform. The licensing and pricing changes are no longer a surprise; the financial modeling has likely been run multiple times, and in many organizations, the move has been deferred rather than avoided. The question isn’t whether to look at alternatives, but what, when, and how to fund it.

The year’s budget already has other commitments -  and for many teams, those commitments involve AI. Almost every conversation I have now comes back to how to bring AI into the business, from daily workflows to customer-facing services. A consistent challenge I see teams running up against is prioritizing their resources, as a  platform migration directly competes with new AI initiatives  for the same budget, time, and people.

Since none of this is news to you, I’ll get straight to how we can help.

The real migration blocker: Carrying 2 budgets at once

When we get into the details with customers, the virtual machines themselves are rarely the difficult part. The work is in everything built around them over the last decade: backup and recovery, disaster recovery runbooks, storage, network and segmentation policy, monitoring, and the application vendors whose support statements you need before anything moves. At a few hundred virtual machines, that is a project. At several thousand, it is a full program with change windows, application owners, and a risk register - and any plan that doesn’t account for that is not worth reading.

None of that is usually what stops a migration plan from moving forward, though. The money is. You keep paying for the platform you are leaving while funding the migration, the training, and the rollout of the platform replacing it. For many organizations, that overlap is what makes an otherwise sensible migration difficult to justify. 

The decision stops being about the technology and becomes a question of whether you can carry 2 platforms through a single budget cycle. That is also the part we can actually solve.

Red Hat is taking one of those costs away

On a qualifying 3-year agreement, the first year of Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization subscriptions is free.

To be clear: That covers the subscription cost and nothing else. Your hardware, the migration work, the training, and the rollout all stay with you, as does your existing platform commitment. It removes one major barrier rather than all of them - but for many teams I talk to, it’s the specific barrier holding up the decision.

If you have recently been handed a restructured multi-year agreement you did not ask for, being wary of a 3-year commitment is  entirely fair. However, you can establish what qualifies, and what the later years look like, before committing to any of it. And the assessment ensures that you are deciding on numbers from your own environment rather than ours.

A free first year is not a reason to choose a platform on its own. The point is that by eliminating that financial overlap, the decision goes back to the technology, the migration path, and what the platform delivers for your business long-term.

Start with your own estate

The Red Hat OpenShift migration advisor is free to use and self-serve. You can point it at your environment and get an instant view of what you are running without booking a call - which often is enough to tell you whether this is a conversation worth having at all.

If it is, the next step is a Virtualization Migration Assessment. This is a paid engagement, delivered over 2 weeks by Red Hat Consulting or by one of our partners, and it produces a migration plan built around your actual estate rather than a generic proposal. It means you find out what can move - and how - before committing to anything long-term. If you proceed, the cost of the assessment is credited back against your subscriptions.

A foundation, not simply a replacement hypervisor

Replacing one hypervisor with another solves this year’s problem but leaves you in the same position later. Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization runs your virtual machines on the same platform that runs containers and other application workloads, under a common operating model across environments. That gives you greater flexibility in where workloads run over time.

None of that has to happen on day one. Migrate what you need at a pace your team can sustain, and know that the platform underneath is ready when containers, hybrid cloud, AI, or edge become relevant. Nobody is asking you to modernize everything because a renewal date moved.

Where to start

If your renewal is already in the calendar, the useful thing to do now is find out what a move would really involve, and what it would cost you in the year you would have to pay for it. 

To see where you stand without booking a call, run the free Red Hat OpenShift migration advisor on your estate. When you’re ready to explore year-one subscription savings, contact your Red Hat account manager or visit our promotion page to learn more about this limited-time offer.  We’ll walk you through qualification criteria and what the first step looks like to kickstart your migration on the right terms to a modern, hybrid cloud foundation.