Vendor migrations in Manchester —
VMware, Cisco, on-prem to cloud, done safely.
Servnet runs parallel-run vendor migrations for Manchester businesses facing Broadcom-era VMware pricing, Cisco hardware end-of-life, on-prem to cloud lift-and-shift or platform consolidation. Discovery → pilot → migration waves → decommission, with the legacy platform left running until the new one passes every acceptance test. Manchester cutovers happen Friday-evening to Sunday so Monday open is clean across Spinningfields, MediaCity and the GM public-sector estate.
Why Manchester is in the middle of every current migration cycle
Manchester concentrates the firms feeling the migration triggers currently in play — VMware's Broadcom-era pricing on financial-services VMware estates, Cisco end-of-life across the Greater Manchester branch-office network, NHS GM cloud-shift programmes, and the steady on-prem-to-cloud move across North-West fintech.
VMware → Nutanix for North-West regulated estates
Broadcom's VMware pricing has made the platform cost-prohibitive for many Spinningfields finance and NHS GM trust customers. We run VMware → Nutanix AHV (most common in regulated estates), VMware → vSAN ESA (when the firm stays VMware), and VMware → Azure Stack HCI (Microsoft-centric GM Councils).
Cisco → Fortinet for GM branch + perimeter
Manchester multi-site firms running ageing Cisco Catalyst / Meraki / ASA / Firepower are consolidating onto Fortinet single-pane (FortiGate + FortiSwitch + FortiAP) — typically driven by SD-WAN refresh and the TCO pressure on multi-site GM Council estates.
On-prem → Azure UK / AWS eu-west-2
Northern Quarter and Ancoats scale-ups lift-and-shifting from Manchester DC footprint to AWS eu-west-2 (London) or Azure UK-South — FCA-aware migrations with regulator-mandated outsourcing materiality and exit-plan documentation prepared by the engagement.
Exchange-on-prem → M365 + Teams Voice for GM Councils
A frequent second-wave for Manchester public-sector customers — Exchange-on-prem to M365 GCC, on-prem PBX to Teams Voice or 8×8 / RingCentral, integrated with the council's existing identity and security stack.
What a Servnet Manchester migration delivers
Discovery + bill-of-quantities
Complete picture of the current estate — every VM, every switch, every firewall rule, every dependency — turned into a migration BoQ you can defend at CFO/CTO review.
Target architecture design
Reference architecture for the destination platform — Nutanix cluster sizing, vSAN ESA tier, AWS landing zone, FortiGate topology. Capacity planning, HA design, resilience tier, network integration all costed.
Pilot environment in week 3-4
Non-production pilot built on the new platform — typically two weeks of soak testing with the customer's actual workload patterns, performance benchmarks, failure-mode validation before sign-off to production migration.
Wave-based migration with parallel-run
Production workloads migrated in waves — low-criticality first, then BAU, then customer-facing systems last. Old platform stays live throughout so any wave can roll back without customer impact.
Friday-evening cutover windows
For Spinningfields and MediaCity customers, cutover happens Friday-evening onwards with engineers on-site through the weekend. Soak through Sunday, post-mortem Monday morning, support warm for two weeks.
Old-platform decommission + ITAD
Once the new platform has run clean for the agreed soak, we decommission the legacy estate — chain-of-custody, NCSC-aligned wipe, certified disposal, residual value credit. Closes the loop for SECR + ISO 27001 audit.
Manchester migration engagements we run
- ▸Spinningfields finance off VMware to NutanixM3 asset managers and accountants with 100–500 VMs moving from vSphere to Nutanix AHV — typically 8–14 weeks discovery-to-decom, with the regulated workload migrated last under change-board sign-off.
- ▸Multi-site GM Councils Cisco → FortinetGM Council estates with multi-site Cisco ASA + Meraki branch consolidating onto FortiGate + FortiSwitch — typically driven by an SD-WAN refresh trigger and TCO pressure.
- ▸Northern Quarter fintech on-prem → cloudAncoats / Northern Quarter scale-ups moving Series-B-era Manchester DC footprint to AWS eu-west-2 — with FCA outsourcing-materiality memo prepared as part of the engagement.
- ▸NHS GM trusts to Crown Hosting / AzureManchester NHS trusts migrating off ageing on-prem to Crown Hosting Data Centres or Azure UK-South — DSP Toolkit + HSCN alignment retained throughout.
- ▸Manufacturing IT consolidationTrafford Park and broader North-West manufacturers consolidating multi-site IT (often inherited from acquisitions) onto a single Nutanix or vSAN platform with consistent security baseline.
- ▸Law firms — on-prem PMS to vendor cloudM3 / M4 law firms migrating practice-management (3E, Elite, Aderant) from on-prem to vendor cloud or AWS-hosted — coordinated with the firm's outsourcing-policy committee.
How a Manchester migration runs week-by-week
Weeks 1–2 — discovery + estate map
Automated discovery (RVTools / vRealize / Lansweeper / native APIs) + interviews with application owners. Produces migration bill-of-quantities and risk register.
Weeks 3–4 — target design + pilot build
Target architecture signed off by customer architecture board. Pilot environment built — typically a 3-node Nutanix cluster, target SAN, target network — and a non-critical workload landed.
Weeks 5–8 — wave migrations
Production workloads migrated in 4–6 waves, each wave validated for performance, integration and security posture before next. Customer change board signs off each wave.
Weeks 9–10 — soak + decom
New platform runs clean for the agreed soak (typically 2–4 weeks) with old platform on standby. Once signed off, decommission begins — chain-of-custody, wipe, dispose, certify.
Manchester vendor migrations — common questions
We're a Manchester firm with 150 VMs on vSphere — Broadcom pricing has doubled. What's the right move?
For most Manchester firms with that footprint, the right answer is either Nutanix AHV (regulated estate, predictable per-node pricing, AHV included) or vSAN ESA (if you're staying VMware but want to lose the dedicated SAN). We do both. We'll model 3-year TCO for both including migration cost — typical Nutanix payback is 14–22 months on a 150-VM estate.
Can you migrate without taking down our Spinningfields trading floor?
Yes — that's the whole point of parallel-run. We build the new platform alongside the old, migrate trading-floor systems last, validate every market data feed and OMS against the new platform during pre-open hours, only cut over once the customer's trading-tech team signs off. Old platform stays warm 2 weeks for rollback.
How do you handle the FCA outsourcing materiality memo for a Manchester cloud migration?
For FCA-authorised customers we produce the technical input — which Important Business Services touch the migrated platform, what the destination region's resilience looks like, and the exit plan if the cloud provider becomes unavailable. Your compliance team writes the final memo; we provide technical evidence.
Can you do Cisco → Fortinet across a multi-borough GM Council estate with no downtime?
In most cases yes — install Fortinet in parallel, migrate sites one at a time over evening windows with rollback ready, decommission Cisco only after all sites stabilise. For core / data-centre switching, a brief weekend window is unavoidable but we plan for sub-2-hour outage.
How long does a 150-VM VMware → Nutanix migration typically take in Manchester?
Discovery → final-VM-on-new-platform is typically 10–14 weeks for a 150-VM estate, depending on application dependencies and change-board cadence. Actual migration work is shorter (4–6 weeks); the rest is discovery, design and soak.
We're a North-West scale-up wanting to leave our Manchester DC for AWS — can you do it?
Yes — frequent engagement for Northern Quarter / Ancoats scale-ups. AWS landing-zone design (multi-account, SSO, guardrails, networking), application-by-application migration (lift-and-shift, refactor, re-architect — application-dependent), Manchester DC exit. Typical timeline 3–6 months end-to-end.
Other services we deliver in Manchester
Facing a VMware bill, Cisco EOL or cloud migration in Manchester?
Send us the platform, the trigger and the timeline. We'll come back with a discovery scope and a TCO model on the new platform.