In this article, I want to share my structured approach in managing, planning, tracking and reporting against migration activities.
As previously mentioned in other posts, the foundation behind a successful migration is to have a clear and consolidated inventory, with as many relevant details as possible.
An excel spreadsheet is usually your best ally when it comes to maintain a server or application inventory and keep track of all the migration activities.
CASE STUDY
A medium sized organisation migrating several hundred VMs from their old legacy system to a new target data centre or cloud platform.
How to track it?
The aforementioned Excel file should contain a line for every server.
I recommend having at least two sections.
Server details
- Operating System
- Environment (Dev, UAT, Prod)
- Status: switched on/off
- Location: where does it physically resides
- Service or Application Group
- IT Service Owner
- Business Service Owner
- Priority Category
Migration Steps
- Replication and Cutover target dates
- Replication and Cutover actual execution dates
- Testing: IT and Business testing results
- Migration Sign off
- Post Migration tasks
- configure backups
- configure monitoring
- Update CMDB
- Handover into BAU
Each of the above point will constitue an excel column, which will map against each server row.
Depending on the size of the inventory and the migration plan and approach, it could be worth splitting the servers by category or business importance (cat. A, B, C…) into different sheets within your workbook, ensuring that none of the dependencies are lost.
Reporting
Having one or multiple inventory sheets, now you can report against the migration process by creating customized pivot tables and diagrams that can feed into your weekly or monthly report.
Should you need help with your inventory excel Masterfile, feel free to get in touch and I will be glad to assist.