A regional healthcare provider with 12 hospitals and 40 VMware workloads needed to exit a VMware licensing agreement without disrupting clinical operations. Zero tolerance for downtime on patient-record systems. HIPAA compliance required throughout.
The problem
The organization faced a VMware licensing renewal that would increase annual costs by 340 percent following the Broadcom acquisition. The alternative -- migrating 40 workloads to bare metal colocation -- required moving systems that had never been tested for portability, including clinical applications with vendor support agreements that restricted migration without prior approval.
Three workloads ran applications where the vendor explicitly required VMware as a supported platform. Seven workloads had not been tested for restore in more than 18 months. Eleven workloads had undocumented internal dependencies discovered only during the audit phase.
What we did
Two-week migration audit produced the dependency map and risk register. We identified the three vendor-restricted workloads early and opened vendor escalations in week one -- two were resolved with written exceptions, one required a parallel hosted environment during the transition window. The migration was executed in four phases over eight weeks, with clinical systems migrated in Phase 4 after all supporting infrastructure was validated.
Colocation: Equinix NY5 for primary, with a secondary Hetzner dedicated server cluster in Falkenstein for DR replication. Proxmox replaced VMware on all migrated hosts. Ansible replaced manual configuration on all systems during migration.
Outcome
All 40 workloads migrated with zero unplanned downtime to patient-record systems. Annual infrastructure cost reduced by 34 percent net of colocation fees. DR test completed 30 days post-migration with successful restore of all tier-1 systems within 45 minutes. HIPAA compliance maintained throughout with written attestation from compliance counsel.