It's all too easy for even a knowledgeable and experienced IT veteran to make mistakes while managing a complex server-consolidation project. You have to think about everything, It can be a minefield.
Server virtualization projects are usually easy to justify on both financial and operational grounds, but that doesn't make them foolproof to execute. Pitfalls, such as inadequate planning, faulty assumptions or failure to quickly detect post deployment glitches, can entrap consolidation project leaders and team members at almost every stage. Every time or most of the time we felt that we covered every base, that every single thing had been looked at.... that's when the danger started.
Avoiding disaster while keeping a complicated consolidation project on schedule and within budget isn't easy. In fact a few mistakes along the way is inevitable. It will go wrong: Be prepared. On the other hand, planning and learning from others will keep you away from making the big and obvious mistakes.
Plan for success - While even the most thorough, painstaking planning can't completely eliminate project mistakes, building a detailed virtualization design and deployment strategy will help minimize the number of errors. Planning is really key for server consolidation.
Thorough planning creates a road map that helps managers gather the knowledge required to avoid most major problems. I think people aren't spending enough time thinking about the issues of the existing workloads and how you migrate those into a virtual environment, and what does that mean in terms of cost structure, ongoing expense and high availability.consolidation planning also needs to address an organization's future needs. Look at what you're going to do in a year, 3 years and 5 years from today. Servers, software and other system elements need to be planned with an eye toward anticipated growth. You don't want to get yourself in a situation where you do this whole big upgrade and then you find you need more server capacity later on.
I also agree that every consolidation plan needs to address scalability issue. From the standpoint of server virtualization, it's very important to have a system that scales and meets the performance need of the load you're putting on it. We often come to know about many organizations that either didn't allocate enough storage, or simply didn't correctly anticipate the amount of server power that was going to be needed to facilitate their server consolidation project.
It's extremely common to overestimate the physical-to-virtual consolidation ratio: Experts Advise (As per KBC)
Server virtualization projects are usually easy to justify on both financial and operational grounds, but that doesn't make them foolproof to execute. Pitfalls, such as inadequate planning, faulty assumptions or failure to quickly detect post deployment glitches, can entrap consolidation project leaders and team members at almost every stage. Every time or most of the time we felt that we covered every base, that every single thing had been looked at.... that's when the danger started.
Avoiding disaster while keeping a complicated consolidation project on schedule and within budget isn't easy. In fact a few mistakes along the way is inevitable. It will go wrong: Be prepared. On the other hand, planning and learning from others will keep you away from making the big and obvious mistakes.
Plan for success - While even the most thorough, painstaking planning can't completely eliminate project mistakes, building a detailed virtualization design and deployment strategy will help minimize the number of errors. Planning is really key for server consolidation.
Thorough planning creates a road map that helps managers gather the knowledge required to avoid most major problems. I think people aren't spending enough time thinking about the issues of the existing workloads and how you migrate those into a virtual environment, and what does that mean in terms of cost structure, ongoing expense and high availability.consolidation planning also needs to address an organization's future needs. Look at what you're going to do in a year, 3 years and 5 years from today. Servers, software and other system elements need to be planned with an eye toward anticipated growth. You don't want to get yourself in a situation where you do this whole big upgrade and then you find you need more server capacity later on.
I also agree that every consolidation plan needs to address scalability issue. From the standpoint of server virtualization, it's very important to have a system that scales and meets the performance need of the load you're putting on it. We often come to know about many organizations that either didn't allocate enough storage, or simply didn't correctly anticipate the amount of server power that was going to be needed to facilitate their server consolidation project.
It's extremely common to overestimate the physical-to-virtual consolidation ratio: Experts Advise (As per KBC)
