Cloud & Virtualization

Cloud is not a goal but a platform decision. It is best made with someone who has run data centers and has assessed and prototyped cloud moves. We have virtualized with VMware since ESXi 4.1, today with vSphere 7, Proxmox and Nutanix, and in 2017 we assessed the move of test and development environments to AWS for Vodafone’s outsourcing provider.

$ docker compose ps
NAME                 STATUS
postgres-patroni-1   running (healthy)
kafka-broker-1       running
legacy-hpux-app      exited (1)

Typical tasks

• Assess cloud migrations for test and development environments, build AWS prototypes
• Build, run and upgrade VMware vSphere and vCenter, P2V migrations with VMware Converter
• Run virtual machines on Nutanix, RHEL licensing via virt-who
• Solaris virtualization with LDOMs and zones, SPARC and Itanium hardware
• Automation with Ansible and Terraform
• Containers instead of VMs: Docker, Kubernetes and OpenShift where they are the better platform

From practice

In 2017, on behalf of DXC Technology, Vodafone Germany’s outsourcing provider, we assessed the move of the development organization’s test and development environments to AWS and built prototypes. The difficulties were the legacy systems on AIX and HP-UX, for which AWS offered no suitable platform. On top of that, a data center you run yourself is often cheaper than a hyperscaler such as AWS. In parallel: VMware upgrades from ESXi 5.0 to 6.5 and platform migrations from Solaris to RHEL.