Fast Lane to VM Modernization – 20,000 VMs in 4 Days

The virtualization market is undergoing a seismic shift. Licensing costs are climbing with enterprises reporting 2–3X increases for VMware compared to 2024 levels and Gartner predicts that more than 60% of enterprises will re-virtualize and shift workloads to the cloud by 2028. For enterprise IT leaders, the challenge is clear: "How can we efficiently modernize virtual machine (VM) environments without compromising performance, security, or business continuity".

That was the central theme of our recent webinar, "Fast Lane to VM Modernization", where a global financial institution shared how they transformed 20,000 VMware-based VMs in just four days with Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization and Arctera InfoScale—without storage re-architecture, prolonged downtime, or disruption to critical applications.

A Market in Transition

We see a significant shift in strategy and the tooling that businesses want to use. - Brendan McLaren | An expert in OpenShift Virtualization at Red Hat.

It’s driven by business urgency because of the market disruption that we’ve seen in the hypervisor space.

This shift is not just about replacing one hypervisor with another. It’s about fundamentally reimagining infrastructure to support today’s VMs alongside tomorrow’s containerized, GitOps-driven, and AI/ML workloads. Traditional VM platforms delivered tremendous value over the years by consolidating hardware and improving utilization. But as enterprises look toward hybrid cloud and AI-driven operations, these legacy platforms lack the flexibility required to scale.

The Storage Challenge

“The big question that comes into play with virtual machines is the underlying storage,” McLaren noted. “A lot of customers want to bring their existing storage to the new platform. They don’t want to have to re-architect their whole infrastructure, whether that be networking or storage.”

This challenge is particularly acute because VMs depend on persistent storage for every workload, unlike stateless containers. Maintaining data integrity and uptime during modernization is often the deciding factor between success and failure.

InfoScale + OpenShift: Modernization Without Disruption

According to Joe D’Angelo, Director of Product Management at Arctera, “What we’re seeing now is actual transformation—where the manner in which businesses manage, deploy, configure, and optimize services is changing. But what doesn’t change are the requirements from an SLA standpoint, from an uptime standpoint, from a resilience standpoint.”

Together, Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization and Arctera InfoScale provide a proven way to modernize VM environments:

1. Unified operations – Run and manage VMs, containers, and even AI workloads side by side, leveraging existing Fibre Channel, iSCSI, or CSI-based arrays.
2. Application-aware resilience – InfoScale understands full application stacks, not just volumes, ensuring fast, safe recovery with zero RPO and near-zero RTO.
3. Shared storage, simplified – Native RWX shared volumes unlock VM live migration and multi-node HA without third-party tooling or SSD-heavy overbuilds.
4. Hybrid cloud flexibility – Consistent data protection across AWS, Azure, on-prem, and OpenShift on bare metal ensures portability and choice.
5. Cost optimization – Up to 80% lower footprint compared to ODF-backed deployments, eliminating storage redesign cycles.

A Financial Services Success Story

Faced with rising costs and platform uncertainty, one global financial services customer adopted a gradual transition strategy—preserving existing VM workloads while preparing for a cloud-native future. By combining OpenShift’s virtualization capabilities with InfoScale’s software-defined resilience, they successfully migrated 20,000 VMs in four days.

What made this possible?

The ability to leverage existing storage investments rather than rebuilding from scratch.

As McLaren explained, “You can bring your existing storage and then layer your software-defined storage on top of that, even if it is decades old. The Arctera InfoScale product is very mature.”

Security and Continuity at the Core

Modernization cannot be pursued in isolation. Security, resiliency, and business continuity must be integrated into every infrastructure decision.

“No longer can decisions be made in silos,” - D’Angelo emphasized. “A unified team where the platform decisions—storage, cyber resilience, resiliency—must be done in the context of the broader business case.”

By bridging the gap between traditional hypervisor storage and Kubernetes-native storage models, OpenShift + InfoScale enable enterprises to preserve resilience while unlocking future innovation.

Strategic Takeaways

Enterprises considering VM modernization should focus on five key priorities:

1. Preserve existing storage investments
2. Maintain application-level resilience
3. Ensure business continuity during migration
4. Prepare for containerization and AI/ML
5. Integrate security across the modernization process

As D’Angelo summarized, “IT is kind of like a series of layovers. There’s no final destination. There’s always a new technology, a new way to optimize and maximize the return on those decisions.”

Why It Matters

VMs still run the enterprise—but running them smarter is the real win. OpenShift Virtualization and Arctera InfoScale empower IT teams to modernize in days, not years, with:

• Unified operations for VMs, containers, and AI workloads
• Zero RPO and near-zero RTO resilience across hybrid environments
• Seamless use of existing SAN and storage systems
• An 80% lower infrastructure footprint compared to ODF

It’s a no-compromise path to hybrid cloud, AI readiness, and rock-solid uptime.

Watch the Webinar On-Demand

Missed the live session? Watch the full discussion to hear directly from the experts and learn how one of the fastest VM modernization projects in the financial sector was achieved.

👉 Watch the "On-Demand Webinar: Fast Lane to VM Modernization".