Are you moving to a new data center and you are wondering what are your options?
Let’s review together the most common ways to deliver a successful migration.
Migration Methods
- Lift & shift (L&S)*: shut-down your environment and physically relocate all the required equipment to the new location. Best choice when service availability is not critical.
- Swing Kits: by installing temporary hardware and systems at the target site is possible to migrate your applications and servers reducing downtime for mission critical services.
- Logical Move: setting up and installing virtual environments, migrating virtual machines to the new site.
Migration Strategies
- P2P (Physical To Physical) – L&S
- P2V (Physical To Virtual) – with Swing Kits
- P2V (Physical To Virtual) – Build and copy physical server to a virtual guest
- V2V (Virtual To Virtual) – Virtual copy of VM Instances between clusters
- V2V (Virtual To Virtual) – Seed & Swing: provision of new VM at target site
According to your hardware estate, logistics, service availability and business requirements, you will most likely combine different approaches to optimize your migration and safely move to a new site.
Logistics advice
*On a lift & shift try to split hardware transports on different trucks, and if possible use different roads for each. You don’t want to have all your kits stuck in traffic due to an unexpected car accident!