DR 101: Checklist for Virtualized Infrastructure Migrations

By Harry Smith, Technical Evangelist at Zerto

After going through a million-and-one migrations – both manually and with the help of tools –and having encountered many roadblocks and situations in which I’ve learned from, I can say YES, using Zerto with your migration(s) will make your life SO much easier. However, that alone still isn’t the entire picture when approaching a migration project.  I’ve gone through many, many physical-to-virtual (P2V) migrations as well as virtual-to-virtual (V2V) migrations and moves, but I’m going to concentrate on the V2V migrations in this brief post. As with many projects in your organization, one big takeaway to understand from this is the planning and logistics (people and process!) are usually much more time consuming and challenging than the technology itself.

Some key considerations around migrations are as follows:

• Communication: Maintain clear, and regular communication with everyone.
• Scoping: Understand what makes up the application. Get rid of the unknowns to ensure nothing breaks.
• Ownership and permissions: Who owns the server and application and who will test and validate pre and post migration?
• Priority: Are there other projects in your way?
• Organization: Checklists and spreadsheets: How are you tracking all of this?
• Execution: How is the migration happening? How will the servers and data be moved?
• Contingency: If something goes wrong, how do I back out and reschedule if necessary?
• Tracking: Prepare for change. Track what changes need to occur on machines, applications, and infrastructure.
• Data Hygiene: Cleanup the source environment.
• Don’t forget about the rare occurrences such as quarter-end processes that run and may have additional requirements.

Click here to download the “Workload Migration Checklist” with added detail and explanations.