Facing rising VMware licensing costs after the Broadcom acquisition, a global law firm needed to know if there was a credible way out. Shadow-Soft deployed a production-representative OpenShift Virtualization environment on their existing hardware, migrated five live workloads, and gave their team the skills to run it.
Broadcom's acquisition of VMware created a clear problem: rising licensing costs with no strategic upside and growing vendor lock-in. Staying put meant accepting escalating spend on a platform the firm no longer controlled.
Moving meant proving an alternative could actually work — on their existing Cisco blade hardware, with their existing NetApp storage, running their actual workloads.
The firm wasn't looking for a proof of concept on paper. They needed a live environment that could run Windows and Linux VMs with feature parity to VMware, validate enterprise storage integration with HA/DR support, and give their core IT team the skills to run it independently.
Shadow-Soft deployed a mixed-node Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization cluster on the firm's existing Cisco blade infrastructure, integrated NetApp storage via the Trident CSI driver, and migrated five production-representative workloads from VMware using Red Hat's Migration Toolkit for Virtualization (MTV).
The engagement ran for 8 weeks across planning, deployment, migration, enablement, and stakeholder sign-off.
The goal wasn't to build everything — it was to prove enough to make the decision easy.
The firm couldn't afford a slow evaluation cycle, and the scope had to stay tight enough to deliver a clear answer without building a full production environment.
We ran the engagement as a structured sprint with a defined exit: either OVE works on their stack, or it doesn't.
Two risks were identified before the engagement started and managed proactively rather than reactively.
The first was stakeholder availability. A key client contact held dual responsibilities across the engagement, creating scheduling risk. We locked in working sessions and async decision-making protocols at the outset so the project never stalled waiting for approvals.
The second was NetApp Trident compatibility. The existing NetApp storage version had a potential conflict with the latest Trident CSI driver. We completed firmware compatibility validation during the preparation phase and identified alternative CSI options — including an NFS provisioner and OpenShift Data Foundation — as fallbacks. We didn't need them, but having them ready meant storage was never a blocker.
Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization (OVE): Core platform for running Windows and Linux VMs on the firm's existing Cisco blade infrastructure. Validated as a functionally equivalent replacement for VMware.
Red Hat Migration Toolkit for Virtualization (MTV): Executed live migration of five production-representative workloads from VMware to OVE. Provided the firm with a repeatable migration process for their broader VMware estate.
NetApp Trident CSI Driver: Enabled dynamic storage provisioning for VMs within OVE and validated multi-site HA/DR storage topology against the firm's production requirements.
Cisco UCS Blade Infrastructure: Existing hardware. No refresh required.
OpenShift Day 2 Infrastructure Services: Networking, storage classes, HA/DR policies, and monitoring configured as part of the initial build.
The firm now has a validated answer: Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization runs their workloads on their hardware, meets their storage and HA/DR requirements, and gives their team a clear, documented path away from VMware.
The engagement delivered a production-representative environment, a live migration of five workloads, and an enabled internal team.
The firm is moving from validation to expanded OVE operations, with a documented roadmap for migrating additional workloads off VMware. Leadership has the evidence they need to act on cost reduction. The internal team has the skills to execute without outside support.
A global professional services firm serving clients across technology, life sciences, and private equity. Their infrastructure team manages a VMware-based virtualization stack supporting critical workloads across multiple offices in a highly availability-dependent environment.