From chaos to cohesion: How NC State is rebuilding IT around Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization

Shawn Taylor remembers walking into a mess. “Fifteen different flavors of servers,” he says, rattling off a Frankenstein mix of Gen 4 to Gen 6 HP machines. Some ran SAS, others SATA and a few used aging SCSI controllers. “A disk fails, a card fails, any kind of failure, and the whole box goes down.”

Shawn, IT Manager for the Security Applications team at North Carolina State University, oversees a sprawling security infrastructure: 3,800 electronic doors, 3,500 IP cameras and a smart key management system for contractors. But his biggest challenge wasn’t physical, it was virtual. Fragmented infrastructure, overlapping vendors, unpredictable costs from their existing virtualization vendor and skill silos between IT and development teams were slowing everything down.

At this time,  Broadcom acquired VMware.

That was at the end of November  2023. By May of 2024, Shawn had already replaced VMware with Nutanix. And today, he’s planning the next and more strategic leap: consolidating his entire IT footprint onto Red Hat OpenShift, including virtualization, storage and container workloads. It’s not just a technology shift; it’s a cultural one.

A shift in strategy: From legacy to future-forward

The primary driver for change wasn’t a strategic vision, but rather a pragmatic response to budget realities. “We’re a state agency. We don’t budget well for those kinds of price increases,” Shawn explains. The looming VMware renewal, combined with government fiscal constraints, forced a rapid pivot. There were other solutions proposed that might have been cheaper than Broadcom’s licensing, but not by much.

“It didn’t get us anywhere,” Shawn admits. “We just replaced one expensive thing with another.”

So why not use this opportunity to reimagine the foundation?

The Red Hat OpenShift opportunity

Shawn’s team had already been exploring Red Hat OpenShift for container workloads. But it was a conversation with Red Hat, specifically a sales rep who directed him to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, a capability of Red Hat OpenShift, that opened up a new possibility.

Instead of running containers on one platform and VMs on another, NC State could consolidate both on OpenShift. Add OpenShift Data Foundation for storage, and suddenly, the entire stack – compute, storage and orchestration – could be unified.

Why that matters: Today, development and IT teams at NC State work in silos. Developers use Docker and MicroK8s locally. VMs run separately. Automation is fragmented across Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager (formerly SCCM) for Windows, Puppet and probably some other configuration management solutions as the need arises. Moving to OpenShift means:

• A more consistent platform across development, test and production
• Shared tooling and automation
• Linear licensing that’s more predictable for budgeting
• Greater collaboration between IT and dev teams

“Today, a developer might struggle with local Kubernetes,” Shawn notes. “Tomorrow, they’ll have a web interface to deploy containers to their own environments. Same for the IT team.”

A realistic plan

Shawn is realistic. He’s not trying to containerize everything. Most of their critical systems (access control, surveillance, key management) run on Windows-based commercial software and will remain VMs.

But the goal is clear: OpenShift will host VMs and containers side-by-side entirely within three years while OpenShift Data Foundation will absorb cold storage. To optimize resource allocation and simplify scaling for demanding video workloads, these will continue to flow through Windows VMs into network attached storage (NAS) backends, rather than being migrated to OpenShift storage. This ensures dedicated performance for video while allowing OpenShift's capabilities to be fully leveraged for other applications.

Looking ahead

Shawn’s team is just seven people. “Most of my team looks like me,” he jokes. “We’re close to retirement.” Similar to most changes, learning a new technology  takes time and budget. Two younger engineers, one from dev, one from IT, have become the forward strategy.

There’s also the complexity of running stateful VMs on OpenShift. Scheduling, node patching, and storage attachment aren’t trivial tasks. Today, much of the patching is manual. Tomorrow, Shawn hopes to automate with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.

Lessons and takeaways

Shawn’s story isn’t just about migration. It’s about building an IT foundation that reflects how people actually work. One that bridges gaps between teams, eliminates redundant systems and lets you plan five years ahead, without fearing licensing surprises.

“None of this would have been possible without the relationship we have with Red Hat,” Shawn says. That honest, transparent and collaborative relationship makes all the difference.

While most IT stories are top-down, Shawn's offers a ground-level perspective from the daily complexities of IT operations.. It’s a reminder that infrastructure isn’t just about performance or cost, it’s about alignment between people, processes and platforms. And when alignment happens, even a small team with tight budgets can rebuild the future on their own terms. This is where Red Hat can help - from small teams with resource constraints to vast IT estates, Red Hat’s open, innovative hybrid cloud platforms can help you build for now while preparing for the future.