Jazz migrated its VMware workloads to OpenShift Virtualization, eliminating VMware licensing costs and consolidating containerized and virtualized workloads on a single platform.
The challenge
Jazz, Pakistan's leading digital operator, faced rising VMware licensing costs, fragmented management across VMs and containers, and a need for centralized governance and observability across its IT infrastructure.
The solution
As a Red Hat subcontracting partner, Stakater deployed Red Hat OpenShift Kubernetes Engine with high availability, enabled OpenShift Virtualization, and executed the end-to-end migration of VMware workloads using the Migration Toolkit for Virtualization, with Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management providing centralized governance.
Customer quote
We collaborated with Stakater on the OpenShift Container Platform Virtualization (OCP-V) project, wherein multiple clusters were designed, configured and provisioned to support Jazz’s production and test environments.
The primary driver of this engagement was VMware migration — transitioning away from VMware-based infrastructure toward a more open, flexible, and cost-effective virtualization platform, and to combine our containerized and virtualized workload on a single platform. Stakater played a pivotal role in enabling Jazz’s transition from VMware to OpenShift Container Platform Virtualization (OCP-V) by providing hands-on technical expertise across two core areas:
- Cluster Design, Provisioning & Setup — Stakater led the design and deployment of new OpenShift clusters, tailored to support Jazz’s production and test environments, as per Red Hat best practises.
- VMware to OCP-V Migration — Stakater guided and executed the end-to-end migration of virtual machine workloads from the existing VMware infrastructure to OCP-V.
The engagement delivered a clear and measurable outcome for Jazz, with the most significant achievement being VMware Licensing Cost Savings — by successfully migrating from VMware to OpenShift Container Platform Virtualization (OCP-V), Jazz was able to eliminate VMware licensing costs, resulting in substantial long-term savings on infrastructure expenditure, and combining our containerized and virtualized workloads on a single environment.
Stakater demonstrated good technical capability in delivering the OCP-V Project and leading all the different use cases which were to be migrated from VMware to OCP-V.
Aamer Hussain, Manager IT Infrastructure, Jazz
Delivery details
Jazz needed a scalable, resilient, and cost-effective platform capable of running both containerized workloads and virtual machines. Stakater deployed Red Hat OpenShift Kubernetes Engine (OKE) with high availability, enabled OpenShift Virtualization for VMware workload migration, and used the Migration Toolkit for Virtualization (MTV) to streamline the process. Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management (RHACM) was deployed for single-pane-of-glass visibility, policy enforcement, cluster lifecycle management, and observability.
The migration went far beyond simple VM moves. Stakater and Jazz migrated diverse, business-critical workloads with minimal downtime: RHEL and Ubuntu VMs, VMs with Raw Device Mapping (RDM) disks, an Oracle RAC cluster with shared RDM disks, a Pacemaker high-availability cluster, OpenShift control plane and ODF nodes running on VMware, a RHEL Satellite VM, imported OVA VMs, and Ansible Automation Platform VMs. Migrated VMs were configured with VLAN segregation, preserving Jazz’s strict multi-tenant networking and compliance requirements.
Why Stakater
- Red Hat subcontracting partner with deep OpenShift Virtualization expertise
- End-to-end VMware exit: design, provisioning, migration, and validation
- Complex enterprise workloads migrated with minimal downtime, including Oracle RAC and HA clusters
- Centralized governance and observability with RHACM