Data center migration

processes, articles about data center and migration

.https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/cloud-migration/planning-a-multi-year-data-center-migration

Discovery

Understand the

• Existing hardware mapping

• Software applications

• Storage layers (databases, fileshares)

• Operating systems

• Network configurations

• Security requirements

• Modes of operation (release cadence, how to deploy, escalation management, system maintenance, patching, virtualization)

• Licensing and compliance

Discovery and planning phase

key milestones are

• Creating a "shared" datacenter inventory footprint - All teams that are part of the cloud migration should be aware of the assets and resources that will go live.

• Completing an initial GCP foundations design - Identifying the centralized concepts of GCP organization such as folder structure, IAM, network administration model.

Planning

Planning leverages the assets and deliverables gathered in discovery phase to create migration waves.

Consider:

• Migration complexity and risk - tackle the simpler aspects of the migration first

• Number of application dependencies - start with the applications with fewer number of dependencies

• Time for infrastructure deployment and testing - factor in adequate time for your infrastructure before full migration

• The cadence of your code releases - Factor in any upcoming code releases

• Workloads in each grouping - What are my migration waves grouped by? Is it non-production or production applications? or by function?

• Timelines - What are my targets for migrating what?

• Map server inventory to similar in Google cloud - Map to similar computer power, machine type

Here you begin to design a future state of your IT organization. Staff model to support key workloads in Google Cloud.

Additional

• Establish infrastructure as code practices

• Integrate code build with CI/CD pipelines

• Define internal Service Level Indicators (SLI)

Execution

You need to be careful about the exact set of steps you take and configurations you develop, as you will usually repeat them during non-production and production migration waves.

Put in place infrastructure components - IAM, networking, firewall rules, and service accounts - and ensure they are configured properly. Testing and ensure access to the fileshares, web servers etc. It includes logging and monitoring.

Execution phase. As an example, you can choose to migrate fileshares first, then domain controllers.

Key - agile debugging and testing.

Make sure to have a short term and long term plan for resolving blockers that may come up during the migration.

Optimization

After migration, the recommendation is for periodic review and planning to optimize.

Add automation and improvements where possible

A range of optimization activities:

• Resize machine type, disks - For cost or performance

• Leverage terraform for more agile and predictable deployments

• Improve automation and operational overhead

• Improve integration with logging, monitoring and alert tools

• Adapt managed services to reduce operational overhead