The VM conversion completed without errors. Every workload made it across. The migration dashboard showed green, the project lead closed the ticket, and the consultants left the building. Three weeks later, backup verification jobs are silently failing. Monitoring dashboards are dark. The on-call team is operating without baselines. Nobody knows what normal looks like on the new platform. The VM conversion worked. The migration did not. This is the lift-and-shift KVM fallacy — and it isn't a KVM problem. It's a scoping problem. Most VMware-to-KVM migration plans capture the visible dependency — the hypervisor — and treat everything built around it as someone else's project. The Operating Model Gap is what that assumption leaves behind. What Lift-and-Shift Actually Moves Lift-and-shift KVM moves compute. Disk images transfer. Network definitions port. VM configurations recreate on the other side. From a data-plane perspective, the migration looks complete because the workloads are running.…