During my current engagement I couldn’t help notice a few notable points regarding ‘migration readiness’. Specifically I’m focusing on migrating servers, virtual & physical, to another datacenter requiring new server names and IP address assignments.
Physical or virtual migrations at an Operating System level (VMware supported ones that is) just work – fact. Whether you use VMware’s own tool or your own you can guarantee a migration will succeed. Where things become tricky is at an application level. No two vendor applications perform in an identical manner, configuration applications differ, an Active Directory becomes a repository for specifics and distributed architectures make it very hard to un-pick the links to NetBIOS, FQDNs and IP addresses / port numbers.
In a high performing ogranisation with minimal downtime, strict change control, defined implementation plans, handover procedures and warranty periods it would be fair to say a raft of business and technical documentation will exist. Impact of change can be managed and risks mitigated but of course that is if you have the documentation to hand rather than dumped from someones head. Here lies the problem, or does it?
This is the perfect opprtunity to retrieve and document all the missing information. Doubtless there will be pain during the process of a migration if all the facts aren’t present but that was going to happen anyway.
Achievable positives and deliverables:
- Proven documentation of the business impact.
- Proven documentation of the local & distributed services configuration.
- Auditable trail for the creation of the service, Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery procedures.
This is the turning point to return documentation and knowledge that were previously elusive or non-existent. This is the opportunity to deliver over and above simply migrating and consolidating.
