Case study · SMB / Manufacturing · Frankfurt, Germany
ITSECOPS moved 18 production VMs from an aging VMware cluster to Microsoft Azure for a Frankfurt manufacturer — with German data residency, GDPR-aligned controls and cutovers measured in minutes, not weekends.
The client
A mid-sized manufacturing company near Frankfurt running ERP, file, print and application servers on vSphere hosts approaching end of support.
The challenge
A hardware refresh quote big enough to fund years of cloud — but leadership required EU data residency, predictable monthly costs and minimal production disruption.
What we did
- Ran an Azure Migrate assessment to size every workload on real utilisation, not vendor spec sheets.
- Landed workloads in Germany West Central for data residency, with right-sized SKUs and reserved-instance pricing on steady-state servers.
- Replicated VMs ahead of time and cut over in planned waves — the longest single cutover window was under 30 minutes.
- Wrapped the estate in Azure Backup, NSG segmentation and GDPR-aligned logging from day one.
Results
- 18 VMs migrated; VMware hosts decommissioned.
- No hardware refresh spend; predictable monthly run rate with reservations.
- Recovery posture improved from tape-era backups to tested cloud restore points.
FAQ
Lift-and-shift or re-platform first?
Lift-and-shift first is usually right for SMBs: it removes the hardware deadline, then lets you re-platform selectively once workloads are observable in Azure.
How much downtime does a VMware to Azure migration need?
With pre-replication, most individual servers cut over in 15–45 minutes. Downtime is a scheduling exercise, not a technical penalty.
Can data stay in Germany?
Yes — Azure offers German regions, and residency is enforced at the resource level as part of the landing-zone design.