When flooring company Romanoff Renovations — which handles all commercial and residential installs for Home Depot across 13 U.S. states — first reached out to Summit, they weren’t yet looking for a VMware to Hyper-V migration. The business was just looking for a more responsive partner to manage the private cloud supporting its operations across the United States. 

They were using VMware for a hypervisor and seeing the price tick steadily up in the wake of the Broadcom acquisition. VMware did the job, but Romanoff was paying for it. We walked them through how a switch to Hyper-V would save them money and create new opportunities for efficiency. We explained how Summit would help, moving them through a deliberate four-part process designed to reduce risk and minimize their effort. 

“The cost-savings alone were enough to sway senior management, giving us the greenlight to get started.”

— Summit's Implementation Team

Our team at Summit offered the option of a straightforward managed service provider switch, which would give them the 24/7/365 support they were seeking. We decided to show them what was possible. 

The only thing better than an always-on-call partner is a partner so reliable you never have to call. 

Romanoff's Key Challenges
  • Responsiveness: They needed a partner with 24/7/365 support.
  • Cost Savings: VMware’s rising post-Broadcom prices demanded an affordable alternative.
  • Infrastructure Growth: Infrastructure needed to support continued national expansion.

Solution: Choosing to Leave VMware & Choosing Hyper-V as an Alternative 

Romanoff Renovations leadership was satisfied, if not exactly happy, with VMware. It did the job, and when they chose it, there weren’t any true competitors. Over time, VMware was acquired by Broadcom, and prices started to rise, both at a baseline and by bundling packages and setting minimum buys. 

When they came to us, Romanoff was still expecting VMware to be the only option. 

When we dug into what the company wanted to accomplish — meeting high demand with excellent attention to detail — we saw an opportunity for infrastructure to not just enable but encourage this next phase of growth. 

At Summit, however, we start all our engagements with two questions: 

  • What are your business goals?  
  • How can infrastructure help you get there? 

    Romanoff already used Microsoft tools across its different field offices. When we told them that Microsoft had a competitor to VMware that would save them the cost of buying separate Windows licenses, they were immediately interested. 

    Hyper-V had been around for years, but it was only when Broadcom bought VMware and started raising prices that it became a true competitor. All of the many services that extend the functionality of a hypervisor started to expand support to Hyper-V and its open-source peer, Proxmox. 

    Hyper-V was now a full-featured alternative to VMware — one that came with its own licenses and integrated seamlessly with the company’s public cloud in Azure. We were able to show how well the two clouds work together — the closest we’ve seen to the true promise of a hybrid cloud. The math made a clear case for Romanoff Renovations to expand the scope of its migration to include a move from VMware to Hyper-V along with the move to Summit. 

    Dell: Summit’s Partner of Choice for Private Cloud Hardware 

    Dell Gold Partner

    Part of Summit’s discovery process is evaluating whether a client’s hardware is right-sized for where the business is going — the kind of deep assessment most companies don’t have the time or vendor expertise to do on their own. With Romanoff, we found an environment that had grown inconsistently over time: different servers running different core counts at different speeds, creating an uneven playing field for workload performance. A VM scheduled on one host behaved differently than the same VM on another. That kind of heterogeneous infrastructure is hard to manage and harder to predict… and exactly the kind of problem Summit’s Dell partnership is built to solve. 

    Full Hardware Refresh 

    The solution was a full hardware refresh from Dell’s 14th generation servers to the 16th generation, with standardized, high-core-count processors across every node. And because of Dell’s competitive pricing, Summit could build an active-active environment on brand-new hardware while still reducing Romanoff’s overall costs. 

    Hyper-V Performance Support 

    The AMD EPYC architecture also integrates well with Hyper-V. Its high memory bandwidth and large L3 cache support the kind of parallel virtualization workloads Romanoff was running, keeping VM performance consistent even under load. 

    One thing Romanoff didn’t have to think about was the hardware itself. Summit owns the Dell relationship, so clients don’t have to — evaluating configurations, negotiating pricing, and sizing the right fit for each workload. 

    That work is ongoing: we meet with Dell regularly to plan ahead, track what’s coming, and keep our infrastructure recommendations current. Romanoff gets the benefit of that expertise without ever managing a vendor themselves. 

    No quotes to chase, no SKUs to compare, no escalations to run down. And when something needs hands-on attention, Summit’s Dell-certified operations team is already on-site and ready to step in.

    Using Veeam to Achieve Continuous, Application-Aware Backups 

    We had a second stroke of good fortune when we found out that Romanoff used Veeam to support its backups. When we move a client from another data center into ours, we usually don’t have too much access to the provider side of things. After all, we’re taking the business — no one’s eager to give their replacement a helping hand. 

    Veeam gives us an elegant way around all of that. 

    Continuous Data Protection 

    In its simplest form, a migration is nothing more than making a backup and restoring that backup to a new system. Granted, it’s never simple, but our first hurdle is to get an accurate, complete, up-to-the-minute backup of the environment so we can move it intact. Veeam offers Continuous Data Protection, or CDP, meaning that it is constantly replicating data so it can provide an instant backup. That allowed us to make an initial backup and run delta backups to capture any changes that occurred after, rather than trying to time a single, massive backup to a period when no changes would take place. 

    Application-Aware Restore 

    Beyond the continuous capture, Veeam backups are also application-aware. When you go to restore a virtual machine from a Veeam backup, Veeam talks to the VSS writer, which tells the Microsoft SQL servers that this is a restore, not a reboot. When you bring a database back online without application awareness, it will assume your application crashed and force you to go through discovery to diagnose the issue. 

    It’s like the difference between Apple’s Time Machine and an external hard drive. Back everything up to Time Machine, and all you have to do is select the environment you want to return to. Use an external hard drive, and you can expect to spend some time configuring the data before everything runs as it should. It’s just one of the many ways Veeam is ahead of its competitors. 

    Process: A 4-Point for VMware to Hyper-V Migration 

    With all our tooling in place, we were ready to begin migrating Romanoff away from VMware. Infrastructure is the backbone of business, and migrations very much demand a “move slow, break nothing” approach. We proposed a four-point plan to make sure every bit of data and application architecture made the move intact, ensuring business continuity. 

    Phase 1: Infrastructure Discovery & Assessment

    1
    Parity is a low bar. If you’re going to go through the migration process, you should come out on the other side with something better than what you had before. An assessment gives everyone a chance to identify how the infrastructure is being used today and visualize how it will be used tomorrow. Almost always, we’ll find some unused piece of infrastructure still floating around and costing money. Taking time here can lead to big savings down the road. It’s also an opportunity to identify interdependencies, third-party integrations, and security configurations so we don’t have any issues come migration day.

    Phase 2: Private Cloud Design & Planning 

    2
    Romanoff was satisfied with its private cloud, but the team came to Summit looking for a more responsive and supportive service partner. When we have a migration like this, where there are opportunities but not big changes to make, we take what we call a “Lift and Shift Plus” approach. That means moving the workload as-is, while still identifying any low-hanging optimizations that can be made during the migration. We also take the time to assess any security policies that are in place and improve them if necessary. Before it moves onto our machines, we need to make sure the workload is compliant, encrypted, and up to Summit standards. Once we had a design in mind, we developed a plan for testing it. We partnered with the Romanoff team to lay out all of the functional, performance, and security tests the new environment had to pass. Again, “move slow, break nothing.” A thorough QA is the best way to make sure no errors end up going live. 

    Phase 3: Migration Testing & Validation 

    3
    Assess, plan, then test. Before we took on the real thing, we walked Romanoff through a pilot migration. It allowed us to test the plan — either on a small set of non-critical workloads or in a sandbox environment — so we knew that everything on paper worked the same in pixels. Our migration plan had to pass a strict testing checklist before anything could move forward, which included connectivity checks (internal/external), load balancing, data integrity, and authentication/authorization mechanisms. We also had a rollback plan in place. With all the planning in the world, the unexpected is still possible. It’s our job at Summit to maintain business continuity, so even our backup plans have backup plans. 

    Phase 4: VMware to Hyper-V Migration

    4
    The time from contract signature to migration-ready was roughly six weeks — but Summit handled the heavy lifting behind the scenes, requiring only a few weeks of active involvement from the client for assessment and testing. By then, we had real-world data and lessons learned from the Phase 3 pilot, and we were ready to put them to work. We started with the first wave, migrating non-critical workloads and applications. Then we moved to wave two, moving mission-critical systems. Because Summit has hands on site 24/7/365, we were able to handle this part of the move when it worked best for Romanoff — during off hours. Once we cleared the high stakes, we moved the remaining components like networking and storage in wave three. The final step in a successful VMware migration was the last data sync and application switch. Once everything was in place, we cut over to the new environment. 

    Results: The Benefits of Hyper-V + Summit

    With Summit’s managed Hyper-V, Romanoff finally had predictable, monthly billing — for less than they were paying before. Part of that was simply the savings in going from VMware to Hyper-V. The other part was structural: VMware’s dominant market position allowed them to make demands no other vendor could, one of which was pre-paid annual billing. Most companies aren’t set up to pay for infrastructure like that. 

    • 30% reduction in infrastructure cost and predictable monthly billing from Summit
    • 3 generations newer hardware from Dell  
    • Continuous data protection via Veeam
    “

    This go-live truly demonstrated the expertise and professionalism the Summit team brings to complex migrations like this.

    — Romanoff Renovations 

    Cost was the primary driver in moving Romanoff from VMware to Hyper-V, but they ended up with something better than they expected: newer, more powerful hardware and a lower bill. 

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    Today, Romanoff is in a better place. They have room to grow when the time comes — and a partner who’s there when it does. 

    ST
    Summit Team
    We're the Summit team – cloud geeks, tech tinkerers, and security sleuths on a mission to keep your business running smoothly in and out of the cloud.