15 Minutes to Configure Each Server x Your Number of Servers. Isn’t There a Better, Faster Way?
As discussed in last week’s blog, planning and executing a cloud strategy can be a lengthy process. For most organizations, time is of the essence – they need to leverage the benefits the cloud offers for innovation, availability, and security. But it takes time to understand how your apps work, identify those most critical to business, which are best fit for the cloud, and which require modernization before migrating.
When you’ve mapped a strategy, aligned with business goals, identified and prioritized the apps to migrate and create, and identified the right cloud and automation tools, it seems like the hard work has been done.
All that’s left should be clicking the easy button on your favorite migration tool and sending your apps off to the cloud where they can be securely available to all users, at any time, regardless of the ebb and flow of demand.
Only it’s not quite that easy.
Automated transport tools are very good at what they do – moving workloads from point A to point B, and back again if there’s a problem. But they need to be told what to do; which apps go where, and which assets must go with them. And there are configuration requirements.
Steps for preparing, configuration and transport:
- A key first step is understanding if your tool supports the platform and state of your servers – physical, virtual, or a combination.
- Many transport tools require installing an agent on all the source machines. There are network requirements that must be met, and agents must be installed on a supported operating system.
- Credentials for the target cloud are required for installing agents. Source and target settings must be set up to identify the correct source and target infrastructure.
- Understanding and implementing configuration requirements for multiple products adds more time and confusion to the process, as each tool has multiple setting properties – sometimes 30 or more per server. Cutting and pasting or manual entry are not only time consuming, but can lead to hard to find mistakes and frustration.
- Now it’s time to test before launching to figure out what you may have missed, or gaps that were not covered in the product’s documentation or may have changed since release.
- Create verification processes, contingency plans, recovery procedures. And when you’re done, time to launch.
Copy, paste, repeat.
All this may take ten to fifteen minutes per server, which seems manageable. But multiply that times the number of servers you need to migrate (25, 100, or 1,000+??), then it can become tedious, error prone, and extremely time consuming. Often, organizations use more than one migration or transport tool – one for servers, another for databases, or different tools based on the target environment.
What if you could accelerate the workload migration process by automating your toolchain? What if your team could operate securely, behind your company’s firewall, and interact with the systems you need to execute mass migrations in parallel, at scale, and incorporate human checkpoints at any time?
We figured out a way to accelerate workload migration
Our migration platform, TransitionManager, ships with a desktop companion app that allows your sys ops and admins to write simple PowerShell scripts and create customizable and reusable templates that map your organizational process. It brings powerful orchestration to your automation tools and enables you to get to the cloud at scale, saving time, money, and eliminating errors.
Watch this video to see how you can save time by automating and orchestrating the configuration of your migration tools.