Migrating VMware to OpenShift: Some Practical Guidance and Best Practices
Veeam, Wednesday, January 7th, 2026
Migrating and/or replatforming can be intimidating. And for good reason - there are often many complex and disparate systems with varying levels of tech debt, multiple teams, stakeholders, and business units involved. They need to be consulted, assist with pre- and post-migration activities, and often have aggressive timelines with little flexibility in terms of downtime or maintenance windows.
And all to say, having personally been involved in a number of large replatforming projects in my career for major enterprises (banking, healthcare, oil & gas) and government customers (U.S. Federal, state, and local), it's often a thankless job. Best case scenario, customers and/or business users aren't impacted or don't notice the transition either during or after the fact. Often, months or even years of effort are devoted to ensuring a smooth and timely transition to the new platform - not dissimilar to the millions of man-hours devoted to updating or patching systems ahead of Y2K.
And as daunting as it may all sound, the best way to approach something as big or complex as a large migration is to break it down into smaller pieces.
The aim of this post is to provide you not with a comprehensive A to Z guide on how to migrate (as there are entire books written on the subject), but rather a bit of guidance and insight based on my personal experience; knowledge of the relevant technologies; and some important lessons learned.