Breaking Free: A Practical Guide to Migrating from Commercial to Open-Source Virtualization

When the Broadcom acquisition of VMware sent our virtualization licensing costs soaring, our small R2 university faced a critical decision: absorb unsustainable budget increases or chart a new course. We chose to migrate our entire virtualization infrastructure from Dell VxRail HCI to Proxmox, an open-source alternative. And we completed it successfully within one academic year. This session provides a candid, practical roadmap for institutions considering similar migrations. We'll share some background on the history of our virtualization environment and how that history colored our decision-making. We will share how we evaluated alternatives and assessed risk tolerance. You will learn about our migration methodology, testing protocols, and our phased cutover strategy that maintained 99.9% uptime throughout the transition. We won't shy away from the challenges that we encountered: you will hear about the unexpected technical hurdles we encountered, how we addressed staff training and skill gaps, and the cultural shift required when moving from vendor-supported to community-supported infrastructure. We'll present honest metrics: actual cost savings, staff time investment, and performance comparisons.