Sheetz, a major US convenience store operator with 838 locations, is transitioning its virtualization infrastructure away from VMware to StorMagic’s SvHCI platform. The company currently runs 12 to 14 virtual machines per store on VMware vSphere, a setup that has been in place since 2019 across Dell server hardware. In total, the migration involves moving approximately 11,000 VMs from Broadcom’s virtualization offering.
The decision to leave VMware stems from Broadcom’s restructuring of the virtualization division following its acquisition. According to Scott Robertson, Sheetz’s infrastructure team manager, the shift from perpetual licensing to mandatory subscription bundles with five-year commitments created budgeting uncertainty and increased vendor lock-in concerns. Robertson stated that the projected price increases, combined with the new licensing model, made the change necessary for the company’s financial planning.
Sheetz has already completed the migration for more than 600 of its stores, averaging approximately 200 locations per month. The company expects to finish the full transition within four months. The choice of StorMagic was influenced by Sheetz’s existing use of the vendor’s SvSAN storage solution since 2019, which demonstrated capability in managing critical in-store applications reliably. Gary Sliver, Sheetz’s director of platform engineering, highlighted that the StorMagic solution enables centralized management across the distributed retail environment without requiring field technicians to visit individual locations.
The migration presented technical challenges typical of large-scale infrastructure projects. Robertson noted that automation tools and StorMagic’s VM Import Utility were essential for managing the transition while maintaining 24/7 retail operations. The primary difficulty involved coordinating planning, development, and implementation simultaneously across hundreds of sites, though the remote migration capability without hardware upgrades provided significant cost savings.
Sheetz joins other major enterprises including Allstate, T-Mobile, and Tesco in departing from VMware. Industry analysts estimate that 35 percent of VMware workloads could migrate to alternative platforms by 2028. StorMagic, traditionally focused on small-to-medium businesses, views large distributed enterprises as a growing market opportunity, particularly those operating hundreds of remote locations facing similar IT constraints as smaller operations.
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