I talk to a lot of IT leaders in manufacturing who are running critical production workloads on hardware they know is living on borrowed time. The VMware hosts are old. The SAN is past end of life. Support contracts have lapsed or are about to. And the plan, if you can call it that, is to keep it running until it doesn’t.
I get why. Manufacturing environments don’t have the luxury of a maintenance window every weekend. Production doesn’t stop because IT wants to modernize. So the infrastructure conversation keeps getting pushed to next quarter, then next year, until something fails and the conversation happens anyway, just under much worse conditions.
We recently worked with a manufacturing customer who decided to move before that moment arrived.
The Starting Point
Their environment was familiar to anyone who has managed infrastructure in a plant for a decade or more: a handful of aging VMware hosts running the full spread of production and business systems, backed by a SAN that had reached end of life. No more vendor support. No more firmware updates. Every day it stayed online was a day it wasn’t supposed to.
There was no single dramatic failure driving the project. It was the accumulation of risk. Every leadership team eventually prices out what an unplanned outage costs on a manufacturing floor, and the number is never small.
What We Did
Our professional services team led the full engagement, from design through migration through go-live.
On the compute side, we moved them off VMware and onto a Proxmox VE cluster, three nodes running on Dell rack servers. That decision alone gets a lot of attention right now given where VMware licensing has gone since the Broadcom acquisition, and it’s a legitimate driver, but it wasn’t the only reason. Proxmox VE gave this customer a modern, well-supported hypervisor platform without the multi-year lock-in and unpredictable renewal pricing that so many of our customers are trying to get out from under.
On the storage side, this is where NetApp came in, and it’s worth spending a minute on why.
The NetApp Piece
We designed and deployed a NetApp AFF A20 as the new shared storage backbone, running ONTAP One and connected over 25GbE, serving the Proxmox VE cluster over NFS. Five years of SupportEdge coverage came with it, so this customer isn’t walking into the same end of life problem again in year four.
What NetApp brings to an engagement like this isn’t just capacity. It’s the operational tooling around the storage, the snapshot and replication capabilities, the efficiency features that mean you’re buying more than raw terabytes, you’re buying a platform that makes backup, disaster recovery, and day to day operations easier for a lean IT team to manage. For a manufacturer that doesn’t have a bench of dedicated storage engineers on staff, that matters as much as the hardware spec sheet.
The migration itself is where the storage choice paid off first. We used the NetApp Shift Toolkit to convert the VMware virtual machines onto the Proxmox VE cluster, and because each conversion ran against a FlexClone copy on the array, it finished in minutes instead of hours. There was no long copy window per workload and no second set of storage to stage everything on. For a plant with no spare weekend to give us, shrinking the conversion time per machine is what made the schedule realistic, and it took a meaningful line item out of the cost of the move.
The same array carries defenses the old SAN had no way to offer. Snapshots run per volume on a schedule and are retained on the array, so a bad change or an encrypted share has a recovery point measured in minutes. We also configured on-box ransomware detection: ONTAP watches for the workload behavior that signals an encryption event, raises an alert, and takes an automatic snapshot the moment it sees one. That response happens on the storage, underneath the hypervisor, so it keeps working even when something above it has already been compromised.
This is exactly the kind of pairing we like recommending: a modern, cost-predictable hypervisor layer on Proxmox VE, sitting on top of enterprise grade storage from NetApp that doesn’t require a specialist to babysit it.
What the Savings Paid For
Here is the part of this engagement I like most. Before the refresh, this customer had no disaster recovery at all. It wasn’t an oversight. Renewals and support costs consumed the infrastructure budget every year, and DR was the line item that kept losing.
Moving off per-core VMware licensing changed what they could afford. The savings covered the refresh and left room for the capability they had wanted all along, so we replicated the new Proxmox VE cluster to ModernOps DR as a Service. They now hold an offsite copy in our data center, a documented recovery procedure, and scheduled restore tests against it.
That progression is worth sitting with. The same budget that was disappearing into renewals now pays for a modern platform, on-box ransomware defense, and a recovery site. They came out of this with more capability than they went in with, at a cost they can predict.
Why This Matters Beyond One Customer
This isn’t a one-off story. It’s the same pattern we’ve executed for a number of our manufacturing and industrial customers over the past year. Aging VMware environments and end of life SANs are one of the most common risk profiles we see when we walk into a new account, and the fix is rarely complicated from a technology standpoint. The hard part is making the decision to act before the hardware makes it for you.
If your infrastructure conversation has been “it’s still running” for longer than you’d like to admit, that’s usually the signal it’s time to have a different conversation. We’ve done this enough times now to know what good looks like, and we’d rather help you plan it than help you recover from it.
If you’re sitting on infrastructure like this, let’s talk before it becomes an emergency.