I would like to present the journey taken by a small team in the Faculty of Science and Technology in Middlesex University to migrate their VMWare ESXi infrastructure to FreeBSD bhyve. The process involved migrating VMs used for teaching, assessment and research, software licensing, and so on, running various Windows Servers, RHEL derivatives, Debian derivatives, and FreeBSD. Services included simple websites, complex web apps, git repo, web IDEs, and so on. There were also GPU based systems for high performance computing.
Outline for talk:
Introduction and exploration of challenges faced by the Team
Analysing the diversity in userbase and systems for migration
Individual challenges with different system – Licensing server, GIT repos, web IDEs, web servers, VMs running specialist software and GPU based systems
How these challenges were handled/mitigated
Role played by automation tool (ansible)
Current status
Future plans
This is a story about that journey!