VMware to HCI Migration Advisor

Quantifying Migration Risk Before It Becomes an Outage

As enterprises accelerate their VMware exit strategy following Broadcom’s acquisition, many assume that migrating to platforms like Nutanix AHV is a straightforward lift-and-shift operation. In practice, the opposite is true.

Environmental blind spots—such as snapshot sprawl, outdated VMware Tools, mounted ISOs, oversized or misaligned VMs, and unsupported guest operating systems—introduce migration risk that traditional assessment tools fail to surface. These issues don’t slow migrations—they derail them.

The challenge isn’t a shortage of tools. It’s the absence of migration intelligence—the ability to see risk before it becomes outage.

That’s why we built the HCI Migration Advisor — a tool designed to quantify migration risk, highlight problem areas, and provide actionable remediation guidance before cutover.

Why VMware to HCI Migrations Stall

From the vCenter dashboard, environments often appear healthy:

• VMs powered on
• Backups running
• Performance metrics green

Yet migration stress can uncover hidden issues such as:

• Long snapshot chains that break during cutover
• Outdated VMware Tools preventing clean disk quiescing
• Legacy NICs requiring driver updates
• NUMA-spanning “monster” VMs
• Powered-off “zombie” VMs inflating storage and licensing costs
• Mounted ISOs interfering with migrations

These are not theoretical — they are the main reasons migrations slip schedules, exceed budgets, or require rollbacks.

For context on virtualization best practices, explore our Modern Virtualization Learning Path and Compute Architecture Learning Path, which cover hypervisor behavior, resource allocation, and performance considerations.

How the HCI Migration Advisor Works

The tool ingests an RVTools export from your VMware environment and applies a proprietary scoring model to quantify migration pain. It evaluates risk across three main pillars:

Data Integrity & Cutover Stability

• Active snapshot chains
• VMware Tools health status

Checks for conditions that could cause failures during migration:

For deeper insight into storage impacts on migration, see our Storage Learning Path.

Infrastructure Modernization Gaps

Flags legacy constructs requiring manual intervention:

• End-of-life operating systems
• Deprecated NIC types or emulations

Learn more about real-world AHV operations in our Nutanix AHV Day‑2 Deep Dive.

Resource Sizing & Data Gravity

Identifies “monster VMs” and NUMA-spanning workloads that complicate mobility and storage planning.

For capacity planning beyond migration risk, explore our V2N Mapper & Sizer.

Instead of returning a simple “ready or not” result, the Advisor produces a weighted Migration Pain Score, giving a realistic measure of potential effort and risk.

From Assessment to Action: Remediation Planning

Seeing risks without actionable steps is frustrating. The HCI Migration Advisor generates engineering-grade remediation plans, including:

Snapshot Hygiene

• Flags risky snapshot chains
• Generates safe PowerCLI scripts
• Automatically excludes sensitive workloads like SQL and Exchange

VMware Tools Updates

• Detects outdated or missing Tools
• Produces non-disruptive update scripts
• Defaults to no reboot to avoid outages

Zombie VM Identification

• Surfaces powered-off workloads
• Tags them for decommission instead of deleting
• Reduces migration scope and licensing costs

ISO Detection & Removal

• Identifies VMs with mounted ISOs that may interfere with migration or backups
• Generates two scripts for remediation:
  1. Per-VM removal script — target individual VMs
  2. Bulk removal script — remove all mounted ISOs across the environment
• Includes safety checks to ensure production workloads are not disrupted

For engineers looking for a full suite of supporting tools, check out our Deterministic Tools Workbench, which includes utilities for capacity planning, NSX‑T translation, VMware core calculations, and more.

Free vs Pro: Designed to Build Trust

The HCI Migration Advisor is intentionally freemium:

No agents, no credentials, no production access required — just clarity.

What the Tool Does Not Do

Transparency is critical. The Advisor currently does not:

• Modify production systems directly
• Connect live to vCenter
• Replace migration tooling
• Hide gaps in coverage

Instead, it shows coverage confidence, so engineers understand which risk domains are evaluated and which require further validation.

Who Should Use This Tool

• Infrastructure Architects planning VMware exits
• Consultants delivering repeatable migration assessments
• IT Managers needing defensible migration scope
• Engineers looking to avoid cutover surprises

If you’ve ever said, “We didn’t know that would be a problem,” this tool is for you.

Architects Verdict

Migration success isn’t about how fast you can move workloads. It’s about how little surprises you encounter when you do.

The HCI Migration Advisor exists to make migration outcomes boring — and boring is exactly what production deserves.

Try the HCI Migration Advisor Today

Run a free assessment in minutes: Launch the VMware to HCI Migration Advisor

No commitment, no credentials, just actionable insights.

Learn More & Expand Your Skills

For engineers and architects looking to deepen their understanding: