As part of a major data center relocation project, Rent-A-Center (RAC) needed assistance migrating existing virtual machines (VMs) from one vCenter located in its current data center to a new vCenter server in the new co-location facility data center over the wide area network. The migration of systems running on virtual servers had to happen without affecting customer and store functions or causing any downtime.
RAC was faced with only two options: migrate at no cost and deal with downtime that would directly affect all of its stores and customers, or spend upwards of $1 million on a solution that promised no downtime. Even if the country wasn’t in the middle of a pandemic, why would any company want to spend that kind of cash?
Möbius Partners offers deep experience with VMware, specifically vMotion. Using VMware infrastructure and new hardware, the Möbius Partners team designed a solution that would migrate the systems to new clusters. They then created common VLANs to handle vMotion traffic between source and destination clusters. That allowed successfully implementing the Cross vCenter Workload Migration Utility on RAC’s VMs to migrate the workloads after configuring the source and destination clusters to support the migrations.
The Möbius Partners team was able to migrate the data clusters without incident while working within the constraints. The requirement of no unplanned downtime was met and RAC saved more than $1 million.
