Organizations are increasingly seeking alternatives to traditional hypervisor solutions due to recent market shifts. Traditional, heavy, and slow, hypervisor-centric architectures were not designed for modern workloads, distributed systems or intelligent automation.
While many vendors offer compelling hypervisor options and migration services, crucial questions remain:
Swapping one hypervisor for another, while retaining an outdated cloud and data center design, is not true modernization. It's a lateral move with limited long-term technical and financial value that keeps you tied to your existing vendor.
Our solution directly addresses these critical market demands:
Rakuten Cloud offers a strategic path forward with a full-stack, cloud-native migration and modernization journey that transforms both platform and architecture.
What we deliver:
Most alternative vendors are software-only providers. They offer platforms but lack deep expertise in real-world data center design, rollout and live operations under SLA commitments.
At Rakuten Cloud, we offer more than just migration:
This end-to-end capability — from the network layer to the platform stack — positions Rakuten Symphony as the partner of choice for true data center modernization.
Rakuten cloud-native modernization (CNM) framework supports migration from any hypervisor to our platform. Built as a highly automated, workflow-based tool, the framework provides end-users with complete flexibility throughout the migration process.
The CNM framework is built around four key pillars:
The CNM framework includes a user-friendly UI for VM lifecycle management, a powerful workflow engine for executing migrations, and backend tools to connect to multiple cloud providers, delivering a true "Zero-touch" experience.
Let's walk through each of these phases.
In the Discovery phase, we work closely with the customer to fully understand their source environment. Our automated tools generate a comprehensive discovery report detailing inventory, compute, networking, and storage components, underlying configurations, cloud dimensions, and virtual machines.
The details of the virtual machines are automatically discovered from the source cloud and then categorized into small, medium, and large based on the complexity of their deployments and their infrastructure needs.
The discovery data is then fed into an inventory analysis, which generates a comprehensive overview of the existing system. This analysis provides a clear picture of the total resources currently utilized within the source platform and allows us to recommend optimal configurations and potential optimizations when migrating to the target Rakuten Cloud-Native Platform.
Following this, a tailored migration plan is collaboratively generated with the customer. If the customer's primary objective is to retain their original investments in existing compute, storage, and networking, a pure application migration strategy is recommended. However, if the end goal is a full data center modernization alongside VM migration, we will together craft a comprehensive data center migration strategy.
Once agreed, the next step is planning.
In the Planning stage, we create a clear mapping of your existing VMware products to their corresponding Rakuten Cloud components, along with proposed target configurations and architectural alternatives. This highlights a fundamental difference: while VMware and others offer a hypervisor-based design with centralized storage and traditional SDN networking, Rakuten Cloud provides a cloud-native architecture built on Kubernetes, supporting a wide spectrum of modern networking and storage solutions.
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A phased migration plan is developed based on the VM classification and application criticality identified during discovery. This ensures that critical applications are migrated with a carefully managed approach. Rakuten CNM offers broad compatibility, supporting migrations from multiple source hypervisors, including VMware, OpenStack, and Hyper-V, as well as a wide range of guest operating systems such as RHEL, Ubuntu, Rocky Linux, Oracle, SUSE, and Windows OS.
The Migration phase begins with ensuring the target infrastructure is fully ready, followed by the actual workload migration. This preparation involves crucial steps such as cloud dimensioning, detailed workload deployment planning, IP transport networking configuration, data center interconnectivity and precise storage design.
Our migration strategy emphasizes efficiency, supporting in-service, live migration of applications from your source environment to Rakuten Cloud with minimal or, in some cases, zero downtime. The entire process is orchestrated through our intuitive self-service tools, designed for both simplicity and granular control.
Migration options:
Ensuring success and minimizing risk:
Once your applications are successfully migrated, the final Integration step connects them seamlessly with your broader ecosystem, including storage and all other essential components.
Post-migration verifications for go-live:
To ensure a successful transition and operational readiness, a series of crucial verifications are performed:
Upon successful completion of these verifications, your applications are ready for go-live on the Rakuten Cloud-Native Platform.
Ongoing lifecycle management and operations:
After migration, users can effortlessly manage the lifecycle of their virtual machines directly from the Rakuten Cloud-Native Orchestrator. The Rakuten Cloud-Native Orchestrator provides essential day-1 operations, including VM snapshot, cloning, and backup capabilities.
Rakuten Cloud offers comprehensive end-to-end cloud operations designed to help organizations predict, adapt, and optimize their cloud environment. By integrating intelligent automation and advanced analytics with real-time and historical data, we provide the deep insights necessary to ensure continuous peak performance and operational excellence.
Watch the demo of the entire migration framework: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffn492zHu1U
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