Metro South Health embraces Azure VMware Solution to enable agility and responsiveness to health service needs

Metro South Health’s hardware-based IT infrastructure required more capacity and approached end of support. The health service needed to update its current on-premises VMware environment with no disruption to day-to-day business operations.

The health service wanted to build an efficient and productive hybrid environment and needed a cloud technology solution that could accommodate its evolving business and clinical requirements, so Metro South Health chose to work with Microsoft to deploy Microsoft Azure VMware Solution

The right cloud for the job

Metro South Health has used Azure services on other projects since 2017. The health service deployed Azure VMware Solution because it offered speed to migration and allowed the healthcare provider to continue taking advantage of its existing VMware resources. With Azure VMware Solution, the health service runs some VMware workloads on Azure and other VMware workloads on-premises, managing both environments to work together seamlessly.

“We’re not a big team and our skill set is very much based around VMware, so Azure VMware Solution really appealed to us,” says Harry Sturgess, Manager of Technology and Operations at Metro South Health. “The tools we use in Azure resemble what we use on-premises.”

By using Azure VMware Solution, Metro South Health minimized its hardware investments, as Microsoft delivers and maintains the cloud service, which reduces IT time and effort. The IT team found Azure VMware Solution simple to use and migrated the health service’s virtual machines (VMs) to Azure without significant downtime—a critical requirement when production systems must always be online.

“We’ve done test migrations to Azure VMware Solution and experienced no downtime,” says Sturgess. 

Cameron Ballantine, Executive Director Digital Health, and Chief Information Officer at Metro South Health, adds, “Working with Microsoft, we have improved our understanding of how we can use cloud technology to enable agile responsiveness to our business demands, balancing the need for on-premises hardware and cloud-based solutions.”

A streamlined migration

The team at Metro South Health used Azure Migrate to perform the initial discovery and assessment, develop a plan, and migrate the workloads. It initially moved two on-premises production VMs to Azure VMware Solution, working closely with Microsoft and VMware during weekly meetings. It plans to move 150 on-premises production VMs to Azure VMware Solution later in 2022.

The meetings gave the Metro South Health team the opportunity to raise issues, work around roadblocks, and streamline the entire migration journey. Since the initial migration, the health service’s provider has built a template for Azure SQL Managed Instance and started migrating some of its SQL VMs into the managed environment.

”The Azure VMware Solution product team and the cloud services team within Queensland Health all came together, and that was a huge help for us,” says Ann Abraham, Systems Integration Officer at Metro South Health. “We always knew exactly what we were going to migrate, the number of VMs, the storage, the compute requirement, everything. It was a very positive experience.”

A fulcrum for change

Metro South Health has demonstrated some reduced deployment, operational, and licensing costs associated with its VMware environment, and it preserved its existing on-premises environments where necessary with Azure cloud technology. The health service is moving VMs to the cloud with no significant business interruptions, and it’s poised to go live with selected components of its services on Azure in 2022. From there, it will quickly scale and add more VMs as needed.

“Ordering and installing on-premises networking hosts can take six months,” says Sturgess. “But using Azure VMware Solution, it’s a simple process to run up new hosts that we can have working in a few days.”

With the built-in CIS Microsoft Azure Foundations Benchmark v1.3.0 regulatory compliance policy and easy-to-use dashboards, Azure also helps Metro South Health meet its compliance requirements. And it can go the extra mile by including custom compliance and governance policies on top of what’s already built in.

“Our level of governance has benchmarked the security settings and compliance in the environment. With Azure VMware Solution, we have supported the health service development in this space,” says Craig Dempsey, Cloud Solution Advisor at Metro South Health. “With Azure VMware Solution, we can apply those benchmarks, security settings, and compliance in the environment.”

Metro South Health is also moving its data analytics database from on-premises to the Azure SQL Database Hyperscale service tier. After that’s complete, the health service can scale its data storage on demand with almost no capacity limits. According to Ballantine, Metro South Health uses Azure VMware Solution to enhance and improve its flexibility and responsiveness to service demand. With on-demand access to capacity, Metro South Health has the flexibility and agility to evolve its VMware environment in any number of directions and continue its efforts to transform healthcare delivery in communities around Brisbane.

“We want to use digital technology as a fulcrum to change the way we deliver healthcare; the utilization of cloud technology will play a role in facilitating this, and our current relationship with Microsoft is contributing to validating our intent,” says Ballantine. “Ultimately our intent is to have a more agile, responsive, and secure technology platform that will facilitate our ability to engage with our community more readily.”

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