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Migrating a complex virtual environment without disruptions is no small task, especially for financial institutions that must balance scalability and efficiency with stability. Discover how Sardina Systems, an OpenInfra Foundation silver member, helped PT Federal International Finance (FIFGROUP) smoothly transition from a VMware cluster to an OpenStack-powered FishOS cloud infrastructure, boosting performance, reliability, and cost efficiency.
Why FIFGROUP Needed to Migrate
At the end of 2023, PT Federal International Finance (FIFGROUP), a leading financial services provider in Indonesia and part of ASTRA Financial Services, recognized the need to modernize its cloud environment. A significant price hike in VMware subscriptions made the situation more urgent.
FIFGROUP faced growing challenges with cost-effectiveness, vendor lock-in, and infrastructure reliability. They needed a more optimized solution that could ensure high availability, minimal downtime, and business continuity while aligning with their long-term IT strategy.
To facilitate the transition, FIFGROUP partnered with PT Pan Solusi Indodata (PSI), a trusted IT solutions provider in Southeast Asia. Pan Solusi, in collaboration with Sardina Systems, recommended moving FishOS cloud management platform, which leverages OpenStack. This open-source cloud technology ensures flexibility, scalability, and cost efficiency, enabling FIFGROUP to seamlessly manage its cloud infrastructure while optimizing resources.
FishOS Move It: A Simplified Migration Approach
FishOS is Sardina Systems’ advanced cloud management platform designed to enhance OpenStack environments. The platform integrates Kubernetes orchestration and Ceph storage to deliver high-performance solutions.
A major factor in FIFGROUP’s decision was the FishOS Move It appliance, a versatile and user-friendly migration tool that simplifies VMware-to-OpenStack transitions, minimizing complexity, downtime, and manual efforts.
FishOS Move It is a pre-packaged virtual machine appliance that streamlines cloud migration without requiring additional installations. It consists of two key components:
- Move It App VM – A command-line interface tool for managing and initiating the migration process.
- Move It Migrator VM – Handles the actual data migration, ensuring a smooth transition.
With the infrastructure ready, Sardina Systems and Pan Solusi launched the migration process.
How We Migrated FIFGROUP Cluster in Four Days
To validate FishOS Move It effectiveness, the Sardina Systems team first performed a trial migration with a single virtual machine. After its success, we proceeded with the full cluster migration.Given the significant size of the VMs (averaging 300 GB each), the migration was carefully planned and executed in stages to minimize potential bottlenecks, including network bandwidth limitations, which can be a concern in certain regions of Indonesia.
The migration of the entire cluster was completed in just 4 days. The work was intentionally spread over several days to accommodate FIFGROUP’s operational needs and the time zone differences across teams, ensuring a smooth transition and minimal disruption to their business operations. This phased approach also provided FIFGROUP with the flexibility to evaluate the migration process before fully committing. After years of working with VMware, they chose to start with a smaller cluster as a pilot phase, allowing them to assess FishOS OpenStack in a controlled, limited environment.
With the migration complete, FIFGROUP began using its new FishOS cloud environment for development and testing workloads, with plans to gradually expand resources over time.
Thanks to FishOS Move It, Sardina Systems successfully migrated even complex virtual machines for FIFGROUP, including those with root partitions spanning multiple disks. This highlights the solution’s ability to manage intricate enterprise environments, a capability that extends seamlessly to enterprises with thousands of VMs.
“Our initial experience with FishOS has met our requirements, particularly for development and testing environments. The platform is easy to manage, with minimal knowledge transfer needed since it’s functional and intuitive. As we continue evaluating FishOS for high-performance workloads, we are satisfied with its current performance and ready to plan the expansion”. – Mardelis Lubis, IT Data Center Architecture Senior Analyst at FIFGROUP.
Minimal Client Involvement, Maximum Efficiency
One of the key advantages of FishOS Move It is its ability to streamline migration effortlessly with minimal disruption to business operations.
FIFGROUP’s direct involvement was limited to:
- Powering down the VMs before migration.
- Verifying VM functionality post-migration and updating IP addresses.
- A single cloud administrator overseeing the transition.
As a trusted partner in Indonesia, PT Pan Solusi Indodata played a crucial role in ensuring the smooth execution of the migration. They provided both on-site and remote migration support and conducted a User Acceptance Test (UAT) to ensure the migration met FIFGROUP’s operational requirements.
“The migration experience with FishOS Move It was great. The setup was straightforward, and the support was excellent. The only challenge we faced was migrating Windows-based VMs joined to a domain, which required some special modifications before migration. Otherwise, the process was smooth, and Sardina Systems delivered everything on schedule.” – Donny Hariady, Engineering Lead at PT Pan Solusi Indodata.
A Scalable, Future-Ready Cloud for FIFGROUP
By migrating from VMware to OpenStack with FishOS Move It, FIFGROUP achieved the following:
- Cost savings by eliminating expensive VMware subscription fees.
- Freedom from vendor lock-in with an open-source, flexible cloud.
- Seamless integration with existing hardware and software.
- A highly available and scalable infrastructure for future growth.
Minimal Client Involvement, Maximum Efficiency
One of the key advantages of FishOS Move It is its ability to streamline migration effortlessly with minimal disruption to business operations.
FIFGROUP’s direct involvement was limited to:
- Powering down the VMs before migration.
- Verifying VM functionality post-migration and updating IP addresses.
- A single cloud administrator overseeing the transition.
As a trusted partner in Indonesia, PT Pan Solusi Indodata played a crucial role in ensuring the smooth execution of the migration. They provided both on-site and remote migration support and conducted a User Acceptance Test (UAT) to ensure the migration met FIFGROUP’s operational requirements.
“The migration experience with FishOS Move It was great. The setup was straightforward, and the support was excellent. The only challenge we faced was migrating Windows-based VMs joined to a domain, which required some special modifications before migration. Otherwise, the process was smooth, and Sardina Systems delivered everything on schedule.”
– Donny Hariady, Engineering Lead at PT Pan Solusi Indodata.
A Scalable, Future-Ready Cloud for FIFGROUP
By migrating from VMware to OpenStack with FishOS Move It, FIFGROUP achieved:
- Cost savings by eliminating expensive VMware subscription fees.
- Freedom from vendor lock-in with an open source, flexible cloud.
- Seamless integration with existing hardware and software.
- A highly available and scalable infrastructure for future growth.
FIFGROUP’s successful migration from VMware to the FishOS cloud platform highlights the power of automation, expertise, and seamless execution. Through close collaboration between FIFGROUP, Pan Solusi, and Sardina Systems, the transition was efficient, reliable, and minimally disruptive.
- FIFGROUP’s Cloud Upgrade: How FishOS Simplified VMware to OpenStack Migration - March 26, 2025
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Superuser
Kristin Barrientos
Mohammed Naser
