Sheetz Migrates 11,000 VMs Away from VMware
▼ Summary
– Sheetz is migrating approximately 11,000 virtual machines across 838 stores from VMware to StorMagic’s SvHCI, moving 12 to 14 VMs per store.
– The migration is over 70% complete, with more than 600 stores finished at a rate of 200 per month, and is expected to finish in four months.
– Sheetz decided to leave VMware due to Broadcom’s changes, including price hikes, a mandatory subscription model, and a five-year commitment, which created budgeting uncertainty.
– Sheetz chose StorMagic because it already used the company’s SvSAN product with VMware since 2019, and the migration can be done remotely without hardware upgrades.
– The migration poses challenges, but Sheetz highlighted that remote migration avoids sending technicians to each site and will save significant money.
Sheetz, a major U.S. convenience store chain, is pulling its entire virtualization infrastructure off VMware, transitioning roughly 11,000 virtual machines away from Broadcom’s platform. The company operates 838 locations across the country.
Since 2019, each Sheetz store has run VMware on a pair of Dell R440 or R450 series servers. Now, the retailer is migrating 12 to 14 virtual machines per location from VMware vSphere to StorMagic’s SvHCI platform. Scott Robertson, the infrastructure team manager at Sheetz, confirmed to Ars Technica that an additional two VMs per store will be replaced in the coming months as part of a shift from Windows 10 to Windows 11. The original Dell server hardware is being retained throughout the process.
According to a company announcement today, more than 600 stores have already completed the migration, with Sheetz averaging 200 store conversions per month. The chain expects to finish the entire project within four months.
Robertson explained that Broadcom’s post-acquisition strategy forced the decision. The vendor eliminated perpetual licenses in favor of mandatory subscriptions bundled into large packages. “The projected price hikes, coupled with a mandatory subscription model and a five-year commitment, simply created too much uncertainty around long-term budgeting and increased our vendor dependence,” Robertson said.
While many competitors are racing to capture disillusioned VMware customers, finding a replacement that matches VMware’s 28-year legacy and comprehensive capabilities remains a challenge for many IT departments. Sheetz, however, had a head start. The company already used StorMagic’s SvSAN virtual storage area network alongside VMware for critical in-store applications since 2019.
“Our initial rollout proved StorMagic could deliver the resilience and centralized management needed across a large, distributed retail environment,” said Gary Sliver, director of platform engineering at Sheetz, in a prepared statement. He added that the migration did not require sending technicians to every physical store.
Robertson noted that the ability to move remotely from SvSAN to SvHCI, without any hardware upgrades, will save Sheetz a “significant” amount of money. Still, the project is not without its hurdles. When asked about the biggest obstacles, Robertson acknowledged that migrating virtualization platforms at this scale inevitably comes with complexity, though he did not elaborate on specific technical difficulties.
(Source: Ars Technica)
