Migration Expert Zone

When you’re working on a physical-to-virtualized server migration project, you do a lot of up-front planning to figure out which workloads from which physical servers will go on what virtual machines, and how they will get there.

Once it’s all mapped out, many companies carry out the migration manually: A specialist creates a virtual machine instance on a virtualized server and then copies all of the applications, data, and OS settings from the original physical server. Depending on the amount of data and the number of applications, this process can take several hours.  Multiply that by the number of servers that need to be migrated, and you’re looking at a process that can take months.

Some hypervisor vendors offer migration tools or image-transfer utilities, such as the Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager, which provides a scriptable wizard interface.  Experts agree, though, that the only way to reduce both the time required and the operational disruption is through automation.

For companies that could use some help with these projects, Dell Virtualization Services delivers an end-to-end migration solution, from initial assessment and planning through deployment and ongoing support. For those who want to manage these transitions in-house, many large enterprises and mid-sized data centers with complex server needs are turning to a software provider whose name is very familiar to server admins.

As you may have heard, Novell was recently acquired by The Attachmate Group, which also bought well-known vendors including NetIQ and Platespin. This synergy has resulted in several new platforms and products, including Novell PlateSpin Migrate, a powerful workload portability solution that automates the movement of server workloads over the network. Novell claims that PlateSpin Migrate can move 50 workloads in less than 24 hours.  How?

PlateSpin starts by decoupling the workload from the host infrastructure and making a peer-to-peer copy across the network.  The original source server remains online throughout the process. 

Testing of the new virtual server can be performed offline, and then a PlateSpin feature called Server Sync replicates any changes that took place during the testing process. After synchronizing the changes, the new virtualized server can be spun up and the old server decommissioned. 

PlateSpin can conduct as many as 20 concurrent migrations, which further reduces the time required for larger environments.  It reconfigures the server workload automatically to operate correctly in the new environment by changing the driver kernel and all of the connections to the new infrastructure at the OS layer.  This allows the process to be run unattended, freeing up technical resources even more quickly.

PlateSpin is hypervisor-agnostic, and it provides cross-platform migration from most popular server operating systems.  For organizations that want to streamline migration efforts and lower their costs, automating with PlateSpin may be a viable solution.  For more information, check out the Dell Power Solutions Article “Simplify Migration of Legacy Servers to Virtual Machines with PlateSpin Migrate.”