Migrating Thousands of Workloads From VMware to SUSE | SUSE Summit Sydney

In this presentation from SUSE Summit Sydney, Adam Centorrino, founder and CEO of CT, shares a practical, "no gloss, no theory" look at how their organization successfully migrated thousands of highly regulated workloads off Broadcom VMware. Serving more than 65 government agencies, defense sectors, financial services, and healthcare organizations across Australia and New Zealand, CT managed a massive shift involving more than two petabytes of data and approximately 7,500 virtual machines. Discover the business-critical drivers behind leaving VMware, why CT chose SUSE as an enterprise open source partner, the architectural design of its new Kubernetes underlay, and the real-world operational lessons learned along the way. Key Topics Covered: • The Drivers for Change: Navigating subscription-based licensing shifts, skyrocketing costs, and feature risks under Broadcom VMware. • Why SUSE?: Leveraging enterprise Linux heritage, predictable commercial outcomes, and the flexibility of an open ecosystem. • Migration at Scale: Moving roughly 150 VMs per day while aligning applications and databases into logical groups to limit customer downtime. • Unexpected Challenges: Managing storage latencies below 10ms, handling vendor-specific CSI driver limits, and overcoming Kubernetes underlay design quirks. • Risk and Compliance: Building tamper-proof, fully encrypted, least-privilege architectures optimized for strict standards like the ISM and IRAP assessments. • Retrospective Advice: What CT would do differently today regarding dependency mapping, early automation, and investing in observability from day one. Whether you are just beginning your migration journey or exploring enterprise alternative cloud strategies, this session provides a practical roadmap for operational transformation. #SUSE #Virtualization #VMwareMigration #Kubernetes #CloudNative #OpenSource #ITModernization #EnterpriseIT #BroadcomVMware