VeeamUPAvailability for the Modern Data Center: Business & IT Perspectives

Volume# 02

4 Steps to a Simple, Secure Migration

A complete best practice guide

Introduction

Make migration manageable

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Whether you’re migrating to consolidate, save costs, improve capacity, deploy new technology, or simply because support is ending for your current systems, it can be a challenging process. It’s a journey fraught with pitfalls, and without proper care and consideration it can lead to some serious problems – from revenue-sapping downtime to catastrophic data loss.

Migration represents a significant change across the enterprise. Its impacts will be far-reaching, and it needs to be treated with the same level of attention and strategic importance as any other major change project. The key is safety – taking the highest level of care at every stage to ensure that what you have in place is protected, and that everybody involved has a clear idea of exactly where you want to be and what the migration needs to achieve.

With support for Windows Server 2003 coming to an end, migration is right at the top many organizations’ IT agendas. It’s a necessary transition, but not one that you should rush into. In this guide, we’ve broken the process down into four steps to help you understand the challenges at every stage and get a clearer view of the dangers and opportunities along the way.

Read on to discover the essential best practices for migration success and see how you can make the entire process simpler and safer.

Introduction Make migration manageable

1Understand where you are – and where you want to be

step

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No matter what your motivation for migration is, the process begins with two big questions; “Where do we go from here?” and “How do we get there?”

The first step in any successful migration is fully understanding, recording, and backing up your start point. You may think you know your current virtualized environment, but to reduce risk and aid smooth and seamless migration, you need to take a really deep look at it to fully understand every connection and co-dependency that needs to remain in place.

Data loss is a very real threat during migration. If you rush in and the process doesn’t go to plan, you could end up losing huge quantities of business-critical records, impacting the availability of essential applications, and causing extensive disruption to operations and untold damage to your business.

By using modern backup and recovery tools, you can capture a perfect image of your existing environment and use it to quickly and simply restore to that point in the event of a failed migration. To get the most from this, you need to use these tools right at the start of your migration project – waiting any later invalidates the process and means you will never be able to completely recapture your “as-is” state.

Once you have securely backed up your current environment and deeply analyzed it to understand it in granular detail, you need to start defining the scope of the migration and identifying what your “to-be” state looks like. This doesn’t just help you plan the project, it ensures that everybody involved stays on the same page throughout and doesn’t lose sight of the goals you’re trying to reach.

At this point, it is important to ask yourself a few key questions:

• What does our new environment need to help us achieve?• Do we have the skills and resources to make this migration

happen the way we want?• What specific capacity/performance/cost benefits

are we looking to gain?• How can the project be executed with the minimum

possible disruption to operations?• Can we execute this plan by ourselves?

Once you’ve answered these questions, you may find that you need some help in this process. If you find that you do want to engage a migration partner to help you, this is the stage to do it. By getting them involved early, they can offer you all the help you’ll need, and ensure that your migration goes right first time.

With every factor considered and your scope laid out in front of you, you’re ready to begin the initial stages of testing and configuration.

Step 1:

Understand where you are – and where you want to be

Customer Spotlight: Tata Global Beverages Ltd.

Faced with a major virtualization project, Tata Global Beverages Ltd chose Veeam Backup Management Suite to help reduce risk, protect data, and streamline the management of its new virtualized environment.

With Veeam’s help, Tata Global Beverages Ltd was able to:

• Improve the security, visibility and control of its VMware environment

• Meet RPOs and RTOs with frequent backup and quick recovery

• Gain total control of virtualized and backup environments

2Testing and configuring your new normal

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Testing is an essential part of any migration. Going straight from your current environment to implementing your new one can cause a myriad of issues across the organization. Any faults or failures that occur will directly impact your operations and can end up setting you back weeks in your journey to the newly migrated and fully functioning environment.

When you have your secure restore point in place, you can use it as a sandbox to test the migration and identify potential issues safely before you go live. It can function as a virtual duplicate of your current environment, allowing you to test everything to breaking point.

With the right virtual lab tools, you can perform functional tests for operating systems, applications, and entirely new environments. That means you can explore the impact of a deployment or migration in rich detail to help you fine tune your plan and execute it far more effectively.

Testing like this also enables you to identify your true capacity requirements and clearly understand the full extent of the resources you’ll need when you roll out your migration. Again, this is an ideal opportunity to engage with an organization that can help guide your migration process. If you need more resources, skills, and knowledge than you have in house, you can pick up on that before implementation and get the support you need, when you need it.

User acceptance testing will also allow you to really see what the upcoming changes will mean for your users. By putting the test scenarios into the hands of end users you can start to build up a complete picture of the challenges and requirements you’ll need to take into account during your implementation.

With comprehensive testing complete, you’ll be in a good position to make a well-informed start to your implementation process.

Step 2:

Testing and configuring your new normal

Customer Spotlight: Datacert Inc.

Efficient backup, recovery and management of its virtual machines (VMs) are high priorities for Datacert. So when it embarked on a new VM migration project, it selected Veeam as its strategic partner.

By engaging with Veeam early in the migration process, Datacert was able to:

• Execute a complete migration in just 45 days

• Save $140,000 in co-location rental fees by migrating faster than predicted

• Keep downtime to an absolute minimum throughout the process

3Implementation and roll out

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Even after extended testing using virtual labs, it’s still vital that you don’t rush into immediately implementing your new migration plan. Implementation should be a gradual process to ensure the success of your migration project. Your choices and actions at this critical stage will determine the ongoing success of your newly migrated environment.

At the start of your iterative implementation process you should take the time to fully document the new system – creating backups and detailed records to help resolve any potential issues later down the line. By capturing the new system at this stage, you’ll always have a completely clean and fully functional restore point to go back to should you ever need it.

Implementation is also the ideal stage to plan for any future capacity requirements. Taking the time now to identify and account for additional future capacity will make things a lot simpler when the time comes to implement and integrate it. With the right visibility and planning tools, you’ll also be able to identify immediate opportunities for capacity optimization – boosting the efficiency of the new environment from day one.

It’s essential that you understand how your new migration will affect users across your enterprise. During implementation, consultative sessions and training should be conducted to ensure everybody can get to grips with the new environment once it’s in place.

As with every stage of the migration plan, you’ll need to keep track of project progress to ensure it’ staying on track, on budget, and on time. A variety of modern availability tools can help you cut the time spent at this stage and ensure that every part of your implementation processes is executed as seamlessly as possible.

With a smooth implementation behind you, the final step is running your new environment.

Step 3:

Implementation and roll out

Customer Spotlight: Raad voor de Kinderbescherming

Faced with the colossal task of migrating VMs between two data centers, Raad voor de Kinderbescherming enlisted the help of Veeam’s migration experts.

With Veeam Backup and Recovery, Raad voor de Kinderbescherming was able to:

• Seamlessly migrate between two different types of storage

• Avoid disruption to existing processes and minimize downtime

• Gain a comprehensive view of both new and old scenarios

4Running your newly migrated environment

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Congratulations – your newly migrated environment is now live! So what’s next?

The steps you’ve taken to get to this point have ensured that the migration went seamlessly, users have adopted it quickly, and there was very little disruption to your existing operations. But now you’re faced with a new task – ensuring the continuing availability for your new environment.

To get the most from your newly migrated architecture, you need to have:

• The security of advanced system and application data protection• Advanced granular restore capabilities to keep you up and running

if disaster strikes• Up-to-date and relevant information on capacity and resource planning• The ability to safely test and develop new applications and processes as your

needs evolve

Getting all of these key availability enablers in place isn’t an easy task. But if you engaged the right strategic partner at the beginning of your migration process, they should be able to help you using a comprehensive range of modern tools and solutions.

As the migration project draws to a close, it’s a good idea to spend some time reviewing the process, assessing what went right and wrong, and comparing your finished migrated environment to the original outline of what you wanted to achieve.

If things didn’t turn out the way you first wanted them to, why was that? If you encountered significant issues along the way, it may be worth getting in touch with an organization with deep migration expertise that can help you understand why. They can then work with you to either attempt the migration again or help ensure that your next migration plan goes seamlessly from the start.

Step 4:Running your newly migrated environment

СonclusionFour steps to migration heaven

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Whether you’re migrating files, virtual machines, operating systems, or whole data centers, the challenges and risks are the same. You need to take the highest levels of care at every stage to protect critical data and applications, not disrupt operations, and ensure that your end point is exactly what you want it to be.

Follow the four steps, and you can take a lot of the pain out of complex migrations:

• Plan: Understand your current state, create complete records and backups of your existing environment, and clearly define what you want the migration project to achieve.

• Test: Use your complete backup as a virtual sandbox and use virtual lab tools to test the functionality and compatibility of apps, operating systems, or entirely new environments.

• Implement: Commence the implementation process, taking on board anything you learned from conducting tests. Implement gradually while considering future capacity plans, optimizing current capacity, and providing complete training for users.

• Run: Review the process to identify what could have been improved, and implement new capabilities to help maximize the ongoing efficiency, security, and availability of the newly migrated environment.

Why Veeam?

Veeam has a complete suite of services and solutions to help you at every stage of the migration process. By engaging Veeam at the beginning of your migration project, we can help you make it as simple, safe, and seamless as possible – and offer our expert advice and guidance every step of the way.

We’re dedicated to providing complete availability for the modern data center, and we deliver it with a range of advanced tools:

• Veeam Backup and Replication provides a simple way to capture both your before and after states to simplify testing, mitigate risk, and enable lightning-fast recoveries

• Veeam One increases the visibility of backup and virtual infrastructures and helps simplify capacity planning

• Veeam Management Pack can help you control and manage your VMware and Hyper-V environments and keep critical applications and services running as smoothly as possible

• Veeam Virtual Labs provide a controlled environment for comprehensive testing, configuration, and new application development

If you’d like to learn more about how Veeam could help you migrate faster, more efficiently, and more securely, visit us at www.veeam.com or call one of our offices.

Сonclusion Four steps to migration heaven

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