Hundreds of VMs, Decades of Sprawl, and a Global Migration Done Without a Single Unplanned Outage

Hundreds of VMs, Decades of Sprawl, and a Global Migration Done Without a Single Unplanned OutageHow TRUGlobal helped Semiconductor manufacturing company execute a multi-site cloud migration and infrastructure modernisation programme, migrating 25 production servers to AWS, clearing 815 TB of reclaimable storage, and completing a zero-downtime DC3 exit across 112 assessed servers.Cloud Migration | Infrastructure Modernisation | VMware ESXi | AWS | Azure | VDI | Azure Stack HCI

CLIENT PROFILE

A Global Semiconductor Leader With an Infrastructure Footprint That Had Outgrown Its Management Model

Semiconductor manufacturing company is a global leader in data infrastructure semiconductor solutions, serving hyperscalers, cloud, enterprise, and carrier infrastructure markets with silicon, software, and security platforms. Headquartered in Santa Clara, California, the company operates across North America, Europe, Israel, India, Japan, China, Vietnam, Singapore, and Australia, with more than 6,500 employees and annual revenue exceeding $5 billion.

The scale and geographic distribution of Semiconductor manufacturing company’s engineering and production operations meant that its IT infrastructure had grown proportionally complex. Multiple global data centre sites, hundreds of virtual machines across VMware ESXi environments, a Windows 10 VDI estate approaching end-of-support, and a growing Azure Stack HCI footprint had accumulated over years of organic growth. The infrastructure was functional, but managing it had become increasingly costly, opaque, and dependent on documentation that in many cases simply did not exist.

BUSINESS CHALLENGES

Aging Infrastructure, Tight Timelines, and No Map of What Was Actually Running

The challenges Semiconductor manufacturing company’s IT infrastructure team faced were the compounded consequence of years of growth without a corresponding investment in visibility, governance, and lifecycle management across the global estate.

• DC3 Exit Programme Under Timeline Pressure: The DC3 data centre exit required systematic server-by-server assessment, migration, and decommissioning across 112 servers, under tight programme timelines and with an expectation of zero business disruption throughout. No comprehensive inventory existed from which to plan.
• Bangalore ESX-to-AWS Migration: The Bangalore ESX environment needed full migration to AWS Cloud with minimal disruption to engineering and production workloads, including application servers that were actively in use by global engineering teams.
• VDI End-of-Support Exposure: Windows 10-based Virtual Desktop Infrastructure across global user pools was approaching end-of-support, with no clear validated migration path to Windows 11 or Azure Virtual Desktop. Dedicated pools including China users, IGXL engineering users, and EDA GPU workloads each carried specific requirements.
• 815 TB of Unrecovered Storage: An estimated 815 TB of storage was tied up in shutdown VMs across ESX environments, with no automated process to identify, validate, and action decommissions at scale. The cost of that storage was being carried without any corresponding operational benefit.
• Azure Stack HCI Without Consistent Oversight: Azure Stack HCI had been deployed across more than seven global clusters but lacked consistent operational oversight and monitoring. Cluster health, storage capacity, and OS compliance were not being managed to a consistent standard across sites.
• No Infrastructure Inventory: Across all VMware ESXi environments, no accurate, queryable inventory of the Windows infrastructure existed. VM-to-host, host-to-datastore, datastore-to-LUN, and LUN-to-physical location relationships were not documented, making lifecycle management and audit readiness structurally difficult.

These were not independent problems. Each one was a consequence of an infrastructure estate that had grown faster than the governance and documentation needed to manage it. Addressing them required both a structured programme management approach and the technical depth to execute migrations, decommissions, and modernisation workstreams simultaneously across multiple global sites.

TRUGLOBAL SOLUTION

Inventory First. Migration Second. Decommission Third. Zero Unplanned Outages Throughout.

TRUGlobal’s approach was built on a principle that is often skipped in cloud migration programmes: before anything is moved or decommissioned, it must be fully understood. The engagement began with a systematic infrastructure mapping exercise that documented, for the first time, the complete VM-to-physical relationship across all VMware ESXi environments. That inventory became the foundation on which every subsequent migration, decommission, and modernisation decision was made.

Across the engagement, TRUGlobal ran four parallel workstreams, each addressing a distinct aspect of the infrastructure modernisation programme, managed to a shared programme timeline and governed by a consistent assessment and validation methodology.

The engagement was distinguished not just by technical execution but by the documentation discipline that accompanied it. Every migration, decommission, and modernisation action was backed by an assessment, validated before execution, and recorded in the infrastructure inventory that was being built in parallel. By the end of the programme, Semiconductor manufacturing company had both a modernised infrastructure and a complete, auditable record of it.

BUSINESS OUTCOMES

Zero Outages. 815 TB Reclaimed. A Global Infrastructure Finally Documented.

The outcomes spanned cost recovery, security posture, operational risk reduction, and the foundational capability of knowing what the infrastructure actually contained.

COST EFFICIENCY

The Cost of Running Infrastructure You Cannot See

The 815 TB of reclaimable storage identified in this engagement is the most visible cost item, but it is not the most instructive one. Storage that is tied up in shutdown VMs is not just a storage cost. It is a cost that was incurred without any business decision to incur it, because without an inventory and a decommission process, nobody knew it existed. That is the pattern that defines the financial profile of ungoverned infrastructure: costs that accumulate passively, invisible until someone builds the tooling and takes the time to find them.

The M365 E5-to-E3 license cleanup follows the same pattern. Licenses provisioned for users who are no longer active are easy to miss in a large, globally distributed organisation. The cost is not large per seat, but it accumulates across an organisation of Semiconductor manufacturing company’s scale and is entirely recoverable once the inventory and the decommission discipline are in place.

The deeper cost efficiency argument, however, is about what ongoing maintenance of ungoverned infrastructure costs compared to a modernised, documented, cloud-native environment. On-premises VMware ESXi infrastructure at this scale requires physical hardware maintenance, data centre space and power, specialist operational staff, and a growing complexity cost as dependencies accumulate without documentation. Moving production workloads to AWS Cloud, completing the VDI modernisation, and establishing Azure Stack HCI operational standards replaces a fragile, opaque environment with one that can be governed, right-sized, and improved on a continuous basis. That is where the structural cost efficiency of this engagement lies, in the operating model it enabled, not just the storage it freed.

CUSTOMER TESTIMONIAL

In Their Own Words