Our clients have unique transformation journeys based on their business strategy and business outcomes. As technology evolves and business needs change, it is essential for businesses to make sure that their infrastructure aligns with strategic goals, such as optimizing costs, improving performance or embracing a cloud-first approach.

IBM Consulting® recognizes that VMware® clients face transformational decisions amidst an evolving landscape following Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware. With deep expertise in hybrid cloud transformations, IBM Consulting’s expert guidance can help VMware clients succeed in their journey through a selection of different pathways. These pathways include modernization on premises, in the cloud, containerization with cloud-native technologies or a combination thereof.

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In this blog, we will share how IBM Consulting can help organizations with a preference for AWS-based cloud-native technologies, leveraging the contemporary tools and modern cloud services that AWS has to offer.

AWS offers an extensive platform for VMware providing a comprehensive suite of cloud services, global infrastructure and robust security features. This approach overcomes the challenges that might be associated with an on-premises infrastructure, such as hardware reliance, scalability limitations and elevated operational expenses. By building VMware-based workloads on AWS, organizations can take advantage of cloud capabilities such as scalability, pay-as-you-go pricing models and a broad array of AWS services.

Those clients exploring a potential data center (DC) exit option aim to reduce operational costs and complexities associated with maintaining physical data centers but also to enhance security, compliance and innovation capabilities. Transitioning from VMware to a cloud or hybrid environment can significantly expedite data center consolidation. IBM Consulting® offers data center migration (also known as DC exit), a comprehensive solution designed to assist organizations in efficiently and strategically transition from their existing data center infrastructure to their cloud of choice, including AWS. IBM brings the power of generative AI, supported by IBM–AWS joint investments to provide accelerated and automated migration at scale.

Scenarios to move to AWS Cloud

Driven by need to build new capabilities, increase operational efficiency, and adopt of cloud-native architecture on AWS Cloud, businesses can explore various scenarios to move and modernize VMware workloads to AWS Cloud:

• Migration-first approach for VMware to Amazon EC2 migration: Clients can migrate existing VMware virtual machines (VMs) to AWS instances. This involves rehosting applications on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, which may require some reconfiguration of the applications to optimize them for the cloud environment. Post migration, businesses can look to modernize their applications to take full advantage of AWS native services such as Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for database management, AWS Lambda for serverless computing and Amazon S3 for scalable storage. 
• Container-first approach: IBM offers a comprehensive end-to-end stack of products and services designed to meet the complex needs of modern enterprises. It encompasses a broad range of technologies and services, from cloud infrastructure and AI to cybersecurity and data management. Central to this offering are Red Hat® OpenShift® Service on AWS (ROSA) and OpenShift Virtualization. These technologies exemplify IBM’s commitment to providing flexible, scalable and integrated solutions that drive business innovation and efficiency. Clients can mitigate potential vendor lock-in by containerizing workloads across the AWS Cloud using services like ROSA, Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and Amazon ECS on AWS Fargate. Red Hat OpenShift virtualization allows businesses to run and manage both containerized and virtual machine (VM) workloads on a single platform empowering business to run and manage both containerized and virtual machine (VM) workloads on a single platform.
• Software as a service (SaaS) approach: Applications running on VMware can be moved to AWS as a SaaS solution. SaaS provides a flexible, cost-effective and efficient way to deliver software applications to users.
• Managed services approach: As an AWS certified managed service provider (MSP), IBM can help move VMware workloads to a managed services model. Managed services for AWS is designed to simplify and automate cloud management. Our services help enterprises adopt and operate within the AWS Cloud with best practices, security and compliance at the forefront. By leveraging managed services, organizations can focus on their core business activities while IBM handles the heavy lifting of cloud infrastructure management.

IBM’s Migration Factory to accelerate journey to cloud

Leveraging years of collaboration and experience, IBM brings a deep understanding of AWS technologies, enabling seamless integration and optimized implementations for enterprises. IBM offers a customized approach that is adapted to the current situation, allowing you to meet your clients at their point of need.

IBM Consulting offers AWS Migration Factory, an innovative engagement model that is built on IBM Garage™ Methodology for app modernization. It is a squad-based, workstream-centric method that leverages generative AI (gen AI) and automation to achieve rapid transformation at scale. AWS Migration Factory offers a structured and efficient framework for migrating large-scale workloads to AWS. By leveraging automated tools, best practices and a phased approach, it helps organizations minimize risks, reduce costs and accelerate their cloud migration journeys. The factory leverages joint incentive programs to accelerate client engagements

Fig 1: IBM Consulting’s AWS Migration Factory approach   

Before embarking on VMware migration, IBM conducts a thorough assessment of  the client’s existing VMware environment. This involves identifying workload dependencies, performance metrics and migration requirements. Based on the assessment, a detailed migration plan should be developed, outlining timelines, resource allocation and risk mitigation strategies. IBM brings several assets and proprietary tools such as IBM Consulting Cloud Accelerator, IBM Consulting Delivery Curator, IBM Consulting developer experience platform (a platform engineering control plane which is a collection of accelerators that help to quickly provision and manage a client environment) and IBM Consulting AIOps (artificial intelligence for IT operations) solutions to plan, design and execute end-to-end migration and modernization journey.

Underpinning these assets is the IBM Delivery Central Platform (IDCP). This end-to-end delivery execution platform transforms how we deliver by digitizing and enhancing delivery workflows and enabling real-time governance. Powered by generative AI, these assets and assistants are made available to key personas, catering to their mode of consumption.

AWS also offers several tools and services to facilitate the migration of VMware workloads, such AWS Migration Hub. This service  streamlines and manages the migration of  applications to AWS, providing visibility, tracking and coordination throughout the migration process, including AWS Application Migration Services.

IBM’s Generative-AI powered migration assets

IBM has built a suite of migration tools and assets using Amazon Bedrock. This innovative approach helps migrate applications and workloads to the cloud using generative AI technologies integrated with Amazon Bedrock.

• Generative AI-powered discovery as a service: Helps extracting key data elements from client data repositories and fast-track the application discovery process.
• Generative AI-powered migration assist: Translates natural language questions to SQL query to obtain the migration status of applications and servers from a centralized data lake (also known as Delivery Curator) during the migration lifecycle.
• Generative AI-powered design assistant: Applies models like llama2 on the centralized data repository in Delivery Curator and the design assistant accelerates the design phases bringing in much efficiency.

Fig 2: IBM and AWS accelerators for migrations 

How IBM helped a global manufacturing firm migrate VMware workloads to AWS

Companies that have effectively moved to AWS can experience substantial advantages such as cost reduction, scalability and innovation. IBM helped a global leader in consumer products manufacturing migrate 400 applications to AWS in two years as part of its efforts to embrace its transition to a new product strategy. The client migrated to AWS to improve business agility and meet new scalability and security requirements. In addition, the client also needed to prepare its employees for the architectural shift and upskill them on new data handling processes. To meet these goals, the client decided to migrate its technology from on premises to AWS, resulting in a 50% performance improvement across their business and up to 50% cost savings using Amazon RDS.

Why IBM and AWS

As a Premier Tier AWS Partner, IBM  has more than 24,000 AWS certifications, 17 validated service delivery programs and mastery in 20 AWS competencies for cloud-native application development including the AWS Migration and Modernization competency. IBM continues to strengthen AWS competencies through acquisitions and co-development of solutions with AWS. Read how IBM Consulting augments expertise with AWS competencies.Learn how IBM expertise in security, enterprise scalability and open innovation with Red Hat® OpenShift® can help businesses grow quickly on the AWS Cloud.  help businesses grow quickly on the AWS Cloud. 

Find out why IBM is recognized as a global leader in migration and modernization services in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Application Modernization Services 2023 Vendor Assessment. Learn more about IBM Consulting Cloud Migration capabilities.

IBM’s deep experience in AI, market-leading AI capabilities and the shared commitment with AWS to accelerate the adoption of generative AI—makes IBM Consulting the ideal AWS partner of choice. With 21,000+ skilled AI practitioners, with 1000 skilled in gen AI, IBM brings watsonx™ capabilities and expertise in Amazon technologies. IBM has experience and expertise with AWS generative AI technologies including Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Q and Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service that offers a choice of high-performing foundation models (FMs) from leading AI companies like AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, Stability AI and Amazon through a single API. Additionally, we offer  a broad set of capabilities to build generative AI applications with security, privacy and responsible AI.

Interested in migrating to AWS Cloud? If you are considering migration to AWS for your organization, explore the possibilities and discover how IBM and AWS can help accelerate your cloud migration journey. Contact IBM to learn more about IBM Consulting Services for AWS Cloud.