VMware's Shift: A Reality Check

For FIS-ASP, an established full-service IT provider with over 25 years of market experience and three redundant data centers in Bavaria, the reliable operation of critical systems is its core business. The company currently manages approximately 1,000 SAP systems for over 50,000 users at medium-sized businesses. For a long time, the hosting specialist relied on a virtualization infrastructure based on VMware vSphere and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as the operating system. However, Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware radically changed the market landscape. FIS-ASP quickly realized that, as a mid-sized service provider, it would no longer play a relevant role in the new VMware partner ecosystem. At the same time, massive cost increases were expected.

Complete Control Without Vendor Lock-in

A change in the underlying technology was therefore essential to protect the company’s business model and continue to offer customers cost-effective solutions. The choice fell on SUSE, as the European open-source provider was able to offer a fully sovereign infrastructure without vendor lock-in. In addition, FIS-ASP already had valuable practical experience with the KVM hypervisor and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications.

The validation and migration of the new solution were carried out in a highly structured and measured manner. Instead of a risky „big bang“ migration, FIS-ASP opted for a phased transition. The first workloads migrated to the new platform were non-critical development and test systems. Following the successful validation of these environments, the business-critical production systems were migrated in stages. In this way, the IT service provider ensured that the customers’ strict service-level agreements (SLAs) were met at all times and that ongoing business operations remained completely undisturbed. The strategic shift to SUSE brought FIS-ASP measurable and far-reaching successes, particularly in cost control. Without the platform change, the total costs for virtualization and operating systems would have more than doubled starting in 2027, according to the company’s internal estimates. Simply renewing existing subscriptions would have led to a rapid cost increase of over 100 percent. Through the consistent use of open-source technologies, this extreme price shock was averted, and long-term financial planning certainty—free from proprietary licensing structures—was restored.

The project also exceeds initial expectations in terms of performance and stability. Manuel Sammeth, CEO of FIS-ASP, confirms from practical experience that the feature set of SUSE KVM is fully comparable to that of VMware ESXi. In day-to-day administration, parameters such as I/O limits, bandwidth, and the systems’ burst behavior can now be controlled even more precisely than before. Even highly complex setups, such as massive HANA databases with several terabytes of RAM, could be migrated stably and without interruption.

Compliance: ISO 27001 and NIS2

In addition, the project addressed the issue of digital sovereignty. Customers in regulated industries are increasingly demanding absolute transparency regarding their data. Thanks to its open infrastructure stack, FIS-ASP now offers seamless transparency across the entire software supply chain. This simplifies adherence to strict compliance guidelines such as ISO 27001 or NIS2. Technological flexibility has increased dramatically: The company can now seamlessly integrate hybrid multi-cloud strategies (including AWS and Azure) into its own on-premises offering.

The technical architecture at FIS-ASP demonstrates how various SUSE components are deeply integrated to efficiently orchestrate both traditional SAP workloads and modern SAP and non-SAP workloads. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications serves as the robust foundation for the new hosting services. The previously used VMware layer has been replaced by SUSE KVM—an enterprise implementation of the open-source KVM hypervisor that is directly integrated into SUSE Linux. This allows FIS-ASP to continue using the existing server hardware in its own data centers without any friction or the need for new investments.

SUSE Multi-Linux Support

A particularly critical component for a smooth transition is SUSE Multi-Linux Support. This enables the service provider to continue running RHEL as a guest operating system on the new virtualization platform in parallel for the time being. This allows complex SAP landscapes to be migrated gradually without being tied to a single vendor’s release cycle.

A Bridge to the Cloud-Native World

To bridge the gap to the cloud-native world at the same time, SUSE Virtualization is used. This hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) utilizes KubeVirt as a Kubernetes-based virtualization layer with integrated storage and networking.

This agile layer makes it possible to run virtual machines and containerized SAP applications—such as the SAP Edge Integration Cell, AI tools, or edge workloads—on a single platform. FIS-ASP uses SUSE Rancher Prime for the fully automated provisioning and centralized management of Kubernetes clusters across hybrid cloud environments. Automation tools such as Ansible and a proprietary management interface control provisioning and resource management.

This comprehensive integration ensures a future-proof, API-based architecture that can be seamlessly integrated into modern DevOps workflows as Infrastructure as Code. (Source: SUSE)

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