Mirantis Offers Five-Week VMware Migration Path to OpenStack and Kubernetes

Migration support targets a practical VMware problem

Mirantis is pairing hands-on migration support with its Mirantis OpenStack for Kubernetes (MOSK) platform, giving IT teams a path to move VMware workloads without first building out additional infrastructure. The offer arrives as some organizations reassess VMware after Broadcom’s licensing changes, while many still lack the Kubernetes skills to carry out a migration themselves. That combination matters: a lower-cost destination has limited appeal if the route to get there requires expertise or equipment a customer doesn’t have.

The service is aimed at organizations that want help with the work of moving applications and their data, rather than another software tool they must operate alone. Mirantis says its teams can plan and carry out migrations to MOSK, using existing infrastructure wherever possible. That can make the project easier to start, though it doesn’t settle whether MOSK is the right long-term home for a given application.

Expert help and a replacement for VDDK

Announced on October 29, 2026, the service extends Mirantis’ existing migration tools with access to its IT teams, who can plan and carry out moves to MOSK. Product manager Cristian Klein said the engagement begins with a free assessment. That first step gives customers a chance to understand the likely scope before committing to a migration plan, but the source doesn’t specify what the assessment includes or what a later engagement costs.

Mirantis estimates that migrations take about five weeks on average, depending on the volume of data involved. The average is a useful orientation, not a schedule customers can safely apply to every environment: application dependencies, data movement, and the condition of existing systems can all affect the work. For a business with tightly connected workloads, even a technically straightforward transfer may require careful sequencing to avoid disrupting operations.

The company has also hardened open source software that offers a capability similar to VMware’s Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK). Broadcom no longer makes VDDK available, even though other vendors had relied on it to help move workloads away from VMware. Mirantis’ alternative addresses a practical tool gap in that migration process, where access to virtual disk data can be part of moving workloads between platforms. The source doesn’t describe the alternative’s technical limits or compatibility, so its role should be understood as a response to a specific missing capability rather than a complete migration guarantee.

Different routes away from VMware

The service gives customers another option as they weigh VMware Cloud Foundation 9 (VCF 9), a platform Broadcom presents as a more tightly integrated package of hypervisor, storage, and networking services. Some organizations may choose VCF 9, while others could shift existing workloads elsewhere or place new applications on a separate platform rather than expand their VMware footprint. Those paths reflect different priorities: continuity with a familiar stack, a change in platform, or a gradual split between older and newer applications.

There’s no single migration decision that fits every IT estate. A company might value the integrated package VCF 9 offers, while another may focus on reducing dependence on VMware or avoiding additional infrastructure purchases. Any comparison also has to account for the work after the move: teams need to operate the destination platform, support applications, and manage the transition alongside existing services. The cost of migration is only one part of that decision.

Those choices depend in part on what an application needs. Many legacy systems remain monolithic and run on virtual machines; teams must decide whether to keep them there or rewrite them for cloud-native environments. A rewrite can bring changes in how an application is built and operated, so it shouldn’t be treated as an automatic side effect of changing infrastructure. Klein observed that organizations still commonly use a hypervisor to isolate applications, even as they adopt Kubernetes.

That coexistence is a reminder that adopting Kubernetes doesn’t necessarily mean eliminating virtualization. Some teams may use Kubernetes for newer services while keeping established applications on virtual machines, at least for a time. If you’re working in this space, the relevant question is less whether Kubernetes is present than how each application’s needs map to the platforms the organization can actually support.

Mirantis says its goal is to move workloads to MOSK using existing infrastructure wherever possible. That could reduce the need to buy hardware as part of a migration, though the source of the infrastructure and the amount of data will shape each project’s timeline. This is more significant than it looks for teams whose migration plans are constrained by available capacity: reusing equipment may lower one barrier to starting, but it doesn’t remove the labor involved in assessing, moving, and validating workloads.

Kubernetes skills remain the constraint

Licensing changes may push more IT groups to consider Kubernetes, but operating clusters at scale requires skills many VMware administrators haven’t yet developed. Klein said AI is lowering the engineering effort involved in deploying Kubernetes clusters. The article gives no measure of how quickly that shift is happening, so the size of its near-term effect remains unclear. Easier deployment also doesn’t, by itself, answer who will handle upgrades, troubleshoot failures, and keep applications running once a cluster is in production.

The broader operational issue is capacity: IT estates are accumulating more platforms, from virtualized legacy applications to newer AI workloads, without a corresponding increase in the size of many IT teams. Mirantis’ service addresses one part of that strain by supplying migration expertise, but the support described is centered on getting workloads to MOSK. Customers still need a plan for operating the resulting environment and deciding where future applications belong.

What the service changes for IT teams

The offer may reduce the amount of migration work a customer must handle alone, while the VDDK alternative responds to a specific obstacle vendors have faced. Those are useful pieces of the transition. They don’t establish that every VMware workload will move cleanly, that existing hardware will be sufficient, or that a team will be ready to run Kubernetes afterward.

For organizations weighing a move, the practical questions are whether MOSK fits their workload mix, how much existing infrastructure can be retained, and whether the team can support Kubernetes after the migration. The free assessment could help clarify the first stages, while the five-week estimate offers only a broad starting point for planning. The hard part comes after the project plan: making sure the destination fits the applications and the people responsible for them. (And this is the part most people overlook.)

Support can bridge a skills gap during migration. The longer-term test is whether it helps teams build enough operational confidence to manage the platform once the specialists step away. That said, the announcement provides little detail on how ongoing support or knowledge transfer works. For customers, that unanswered question deserves as much attention as the transfer itself.

A route away from VMware is useful only if it leads to an environment an organization can run. For now, Mirantis is offering a combination of migration labor, tooling, and a Kubernetes-based destination; the fit will depend on each customer’s systems and staff. A cautious assessment is sensible. So is a clear plan for what happens after the workloads arrive.