Manchester Met reduces up to 50% of its network footprint with Azure VMware Solution

A lesson on bringing VMware and Microsoft Azure together

Recently celebrating 200 years, Manchester Metropolitan University has grown alongside its community and currently offers more than 361 hands-on learning programs backed by innovative and integrated technology solutions. Having spent decades building complex infrastructure and systems in the process, it’s established itself as a trailblazer among its peer educational institutions by moving to a centralized, serverless platform to view, manage, and update records for its more than 43,000 students and 5,000 staff.

As demand started to ramp up for more applications, systems, and servers, the university increased its already expansive on-premises VMware infrastructure across two purpose-built datacenters. Investing heavily in its VMware footprint and the platform’s associated licensing, it then started to consider refreshing VMware’s hosting infrastructure, including hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) and the cloud. The university shelved those plans and shifted its priorities when COVID-19 hit, first rolling out Microsoft Teams across its network in a matter of weeks, which it had previously expected to take 18 months to plan and implement.

Coming out of the pandemic, Manchester Met returned to what it knew was now a priority as its on-premises hosting infrastructure neared the end of its life cycle. “Pre-COVID, we had 18 months to prepare for critical end-of-support infrastructure, but when we came out of the pandemic, we were about to run into periods where we wouldn’t be able to get vendor support for critical services,” says Rob Collins, Head of Core Infrastructure Services at Manchester Metropolitan University. “In addition to the outdated infrastructure, we had to physically leave the building hosting one of our 30-rack datacenters before it was scheduled to be knocked down.”

Considering its full digital estate, anticipated growth rates, and capacity needs, Manchester Met assessed multiple options, including reinvesting in on-premises infrastructure or signing a new enterprise-level agreement with VMware. At this point, it also engaged Microsoft to evaluate Azure VMware Solution. The university was attracted to the cost benefits that would come from adding Azure VMware Solution to its existing Microsoft license and having the continued support of a technology provider that had been working with the institution for years.

“VMware is what we’ve used for a long time, so bringing Azure VMware Solution and Azure together really united our VMware and cloud teams and encouraged a shift towards proactive rather than reactive thinking,” says Collins. “Azure VMware Solution is a nice baby step for people who wouldn’t have otherwise been exposed to Azure to try it without having to overhaul their knowledge and skills.”

More than a migration project

In less than a year, Manchester Met fully exited its primary datacenter and consolidated its second facility from 25 to seven comms racks. It ultimately moved 80% of its servers to Azure VMware Solution within eight months, while 111 servers stayed on-premises on vSAN Express Storage Architecture. “As those servers come up for refresh and renewal, our strategy is a cloud-first approach where we can rearchitect and replace them with Azure solutions,” says Collins.

Manchester Met set criteria early on for the types of servers it didn’t want exclusively in the cloud in its initial time-constrained migration, including door and building-control systems that are accessed locally. University IT staff worked closely with an Azure solution architect who helped break down work streams and pulled in partners, including Advania UK Limited, a member of the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program, to lead the landing zone build and migration activity. Together, they also identified the best team of employees, contractors, and additional Microsoft support staff to drive the project forward. University network engineers took advantage of Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals and Microsoft Enterprise Skills Initiative trainings to make the most of the migration.

While the actual migration to Azure VMware Solution went quickly, planning for the migration took additional time as there were changes to a few key roles and technical owners, a lack of documentation for existing systems, and a knowledge gap in understanding integrations and dependencies between those systems. “When we were planning migrations, we wanted to bundle servers and applications to have the best chance of success when those migrated to Azure VMware Solution,” says Collins. “That got us to a point where we could start the migrations phase by phase.”

Moving to Azure VMware Solution was not only a migration for the university, but a transformational effort that led to a shift in the way it uses and manages technology. “We thought about little things up front, like server deployment scripts and monitoring tools,” says Collins. “After we got going, the migration was much faster than we expected and it was certainly faster than other migration projects we’ve done that weren’t based on Azure VMware Solution.”

The Azure agenda

Manchester Met added Azure VMware Solution right into its full technology stack and encourages usage among IT staff, including those who are new to cloud solutions. “Our IT staff still administers the same products, hypervisors, and tooling, but they’re now expanding their knowledge about cloud concepts and how Azure VMware Solution and the Azure environment communicate,” says Collins. “These employees are now pushing the strategy and the Azure agenda. We recently had IT staff members come to us to proactively move a large storage platform to Azure.”

As its teams gain more confidence in Azure, Manchester Met has reported overwhelmingly positive feedback about applications, databases, and systems running better after being migrated from on-premises to Azure VMware Solution. The university appreciates what it calls the “non-shock value” of moving to Azure VMware Solution without totally reskilling or refactoring, which helped it bring its technology vision to life. “Since we completed the migration and stabilized, our goals have largely been met, including putting monitoring in place with Azure Monitor, looking at performance and latency, and improving capacity planning,” says Collins. “This simple migration to Azure VMware Solution, which didn’t affect or risk services, substantially changed the way we worked.”

Gaining confidence with a new cloud-first mentality

Manchester Met’s adoption of Azure VMware Solution has been everything that a highly matrixed organization could want. By tapping into replication technology to stretch its networks across the cloud and avoid any bulk IP address changes for its servers, the university was able to focus its resources and achieve valuable outcomes within tight timelines. “Azure VMware Solution is like an extension of our datacenter hosted on Azure,” explains Collins.

The university has now developed an infrastructure and cloud roadmap that senior leaders are using beyond what they’ve accomplished to date. One of the next goals is to move the university’s research data to Microsoft Azure Storage. “When we needed strategy buy-in at the start of the project, Azure VMware Solution was pitched as a foundational enabler for future cloud growth,” says Collins. “It’s a lot easier to join the dots when all of these services are part of Azure rather than disparate elements on separate infrastructure platforms that you have to make talk to each other.”

On top of the seamless migration, Manchester Met has enjoyed a journey of optimization and consolidation. “While moving to Azure VMware Solution, we reduced our estate and decommissioned 43% of our servers, including ones that people around the business deemed nonessential,” says Collins. “And while our physical campus network will always necessitate a local server footprint, we expect to reduce that by as much as 50%.”

When it comes time to add new infrastructure, the university has fully embraced Azure VMware Solution, adopting a new attitude toward innovation and cloud-native builds. “Now, we almost have to prove there’s not a cloud option first before creating an on-premises workload, whereas two years ago, we’d have to fight for something to go to the cloud,” notes Collins. “We have full confidence with our Azure tooling and have flipped that previous mentality on its head.”

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