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. 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.
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. 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.