Migration Planning – Dreams Really Do Come True!

Share/Bookmark

I remember being involved in a migration project that seemed to go on forever – 150TB or so allocated to about 100 hosts that needed migrating from a legacy environment to a shiny new virtualised environment. Shouldn’t take too long, right? It’s only 150TB…say 3 months? Well, after 12 months we still hadn’t finished. There were a number of contributing factors:

1) We were also moving hosts to a new SAN fabric
2) Backlevel array firmware and unsupported SAN fabric components caused interoperability issues

But the biggest time sink was:

3) Host remediation, raising change control records, minimizing I/O contention and identifying the most efficient way to do the migration

At the time all this had to be done manually. Now, wouldn’t it be great if there was some software out there that helped with all this? Something that could produce attachments for change control records? Something that could help optimise the migration process? A method of automatically creating the target environment? A way to work out which array should be migrated first, in order to maximise CO2 savings?

Too often, we hit these walls and do the ‘if only’ dreaming (as I did in my sysadmin role). But now, I’m the kid with all the toys, as I’ve been involved in the creation of exactly this sort of software. The really amazing thing is being able to help create a product based on real-life experience (and frustrations). Often in a development role you end up creating a good solution, but in reality you are just putting your programming skills to good use for a ‘nice’ product, commonly one that you haven’t had experience of or faced the challenges you’re addressing. Not many things impress me, but these days I get really excited about this software because I know the problems people are facing and I’m actually addressing them – wow!

If only it had existed 18 months ago….

I know I’m not the only one that ever faced such a migration problem and I’m keen to learn what your experiences are. Let me know what migration challenges you faced.

Share/Bookmark

One Response to “Migration Planning – Dreams Really Do Come True!”

1. Helmut Cheese says:

   February 3, 2012 at 12:53 am

   Yawn………..

   Reply