Developing the Strategy
IDENTIFY AND INVOLVE KEY STAKEHOLDERS
The key stakeholders should include (but not be limited to):
• Project sponsor (CIO, VP Infrastructure, IT Director)
• Key application owners
• Server architecture lead
• LAN/WAN architecture leads
• Data center manager
ESTABLISHING THE BUSINESS OBJECTIVES
• Containment of server costs
• Containment of existing servers
• Reducing costs to manage
• Achieving rapid recovery
• Enabling high availability
• Providing instant server provisioning
• Managing growth
IDENTIFYING CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS
• ROI will be realized within 1 year
• TCO will be reduced by n%.
• Minimum of n% reduction in the time to deploy new servers.
• Reduced server recoverability time by n%.
IDENTIFYING POTENTIAL CONSTRAINTS AND RISKS
Typical constraints might include:
• Minimal capital budget to absorb one-time costs
• Limited staff capacity for new initiatives
• Staff uncertainty about a new technology.
Typical risks could include:
• Lack of subject matter expertise on staff
• Potential impact on production servers during a re-provisioning cycle
• Too many services on a single hardware platform
• Lack of thorough understanding of the environment.
CAPTURING THE ASSUMPTIONS
Typical assumptions might include:
• All production servers are candidates for the service.
• This service is preferred over stand-alone servers.
• Consensus among the team will be achieved prior to management
recommendation.
• Production guests and non-prod guests will all reside on the same hosts
(or vice versa)
DEVELOPING AND WEIGHING SELECTION CRITERIA
The following criteria may be considered:
• Availability
• Reliability
• Manageability
• Recoverability
• Flexibility
• Scalability
• One-time cost
• Performance
• Time to deploy
• Ease of use.
REVIEWING THE CURRENT STATE
the most common aspects of your
current IT infrastructure to review are:
• WAN design
• LAN design
• SAN configuration
• Intel server architectures
• Server configuration management
• Server provisioning process
• High-level disaster recovery plan overview
• Server profile matrix
• Server license agreements.
DEVELOPING A SERVER PROFILE MATRIX
The matrix includes critical server metrics, including:
• Number and speed of processors
• Average utilization, including a variability factor where a 1 signifies consistent
utilization, and a 5 signifies extremely variable utilization.
• Physical memory in use
• Network I/O (Lo, Med, Hi)
• Disk I/O (Lo, Med, Hi)
VM STRATEGY DEVELOPMENT AND DESIGN
the technical aspects of the virtualization strategy can be
developed, including:
• Identification of virtualization candidates
• Development of the design using best practices
• Server farm design:
o Storage connectivity
o Cluster connectivity
o Network connectivity
o Switching
• Development of OS “templates,” sometimes known as “Golden Masters”
• Recoverability methods
• Management processes
• Provisioning processes
GUEST SELECTION/VM MODEL
This decision should be based on two factors:
• The physical resource requirements for the server
• The number of users or amount of activity the server will support
Developing the Deployment Plan
IDENTIFYING CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS
• Zero impact on production operation
• Availability of appropriate skilled technical resources
• Development of key processes and procedures prior to production
• Bulletproof rollback plan
• Organizational deployment methods, policies, and procedures will be followed
P2V tools will be used where possible to compress time and resource requirements.
IDENTIFYING AND MAPPING PROJECT TASKS
IDENTIFYING DEPENDENCIES
IDENTIFYING NECESSARY DEPLOYMENT ROLES
Because the potential benefits are so significant, having a diligent, big-picture view at the outset is essential to fully realizing the benefits of your ESX environment.
Accelerate is a big-picture, road-tested process for designing and deploying network
and systems infrastructure, including the latest server virtualization technologies.
Accelerate is a rapid, staged process that starts with facilitated design and planning
sessions and centers on our unique deployment management teams.
No comments:
Post a Comment