Tideway Foundation And Data Centre Migration
-
Upload
peter-grant -
Category
Documents
-
view
256 -
download
1
Transcript of Tideway Foundation And Data Centre Migration
Tideway Systems Inc., 2008 Page 1 of 18
Tideway Foundation and Data Centre Migration
Version No 1.0
Tideway Systems Inc., 2008 Page 2 of 18
1. Contents 1. Contents ............................................................................................................................ 2
2. Preface............................................................................................................................... 3
2.1. Purpose........................................................................................................................... 3
2.2. Document History ........................................................................................................... 3
3. Data Centre Migration ...................................................................................................... 4
3.1. A common approach....................................................................................................... 4
3.2. Common Issues .............................................................................................................. 5
4. How does Tideway Tideway Foundation help?............................................................. 6
4.1. Key Benefits .................................................................................................................... 6
4.2. Tideway Deployment ...................................................................................................... 7
5. Example Output ................................................................................................................ 8
5.1. Full Infrastructure Baseline ............................................................................................. 8
5.2. Full Server Detail ............................................................................................................ 9
5.2.1. Example Passport.................................................................................................. 11
5.3. Dependency Information............................................................................................... 12
5.3.1. Group communication............................................................................................ 12
5.3.2. Software Communication from a Server................................................................ 14
5.3.3. Business Service Dependency.............................................................................. 15
5.4. Lifecycle Management .................................................................................................. 17
5.5. Hardware Reference Data ............................................................................................ 17
Tideway Systems Inc., 2008 Page 3 of 18
2. Preface
2.1. Purpose
This document describes a common data centre migration programme and illustrates how
Tideway Tideway Foundation discovered data is used to understand the existing estate and de-
risk the transition to a new environment.
2.2. Document History
Date Version Details
22nd
April 2009 0.1 Initial Draft
22nd
April 2009 1.0 Final Draft. M.Wallenstein
Tideway Systems Inc., 2008 Page 4 of 18
3. Data Centre Migration Data centre migrations are complex to plan and execute. A great deal of preliminary work is
required to minimise project over-runs and unplanned downtime. The fundamental component
of planning a migration is a clear and complete understanding of the current infrastructure. This
includes all of your hardware, software and dependencies.
3.1. A common approach
The high level process below describes a common approach to planning and executing a data
centre migration.
The crucial initial steps involve gathering intelligence of the existing estate. This information is
vital for planning the new data centre, de-risking the transition, and helping to understand
opportunities for consolidation or virtualisation on the way.
•Manual inventory of
servers
•Manual host-host
diagrams
•Manual host -
application dependency
diagrams
The DC Move Process
>1 Year Cycle
UAT
Handover
to Support
As is Picture
Risk
Analysis
Perform
Migration
Backup Prepare
Migration
Create
Plan
Backout
Go/No go
Go/No go
Go/No go
Standard
Migration
Methods
Manual audit
Audit and due
diligence phase
Design phase
Transition phase
Design
new DC
Schedule Awareness
Campaign
Tideway Systems Inc., 2008 Page 5 of 18
Typically a ‘passport’ is created for each system and/or business service that will be moved.
The passport details all of the steps in the relocation process that a business service or system
must go through.
The passport also includes significant detail about the business service or system, as well as
the owners of the systems that must sign-off at each stage of the move.
Once passport creation is completed the full planning and design phase can begin. This would
normally include a migration plan as well as a backup plan.
In the transition phase the systems and services are moved, tested, and backed out or fixed as
required.
In order to carry out such a significant task effectively and with minimal service disruption it is
vital that the underpinning data is accurate and up-to-date.
3.2. Common Issues
A significant number of errors arise due to the quality of the data used to plan, design and
execute the move. Data describing systems and business services for a typical data centre
move are normally supplied from manual audits and a selection of management agents (with
limited estate coverage).
Issues normally associated with these data sources include:
• Manual audit data cannot provide a complete picture of the environment
• Time to baseline the estate is very slow, typically 0.3 – 2 days per server
• Cost of manual audit; typically 85% more than auto-discovery solutions
• Inaccuracies in knowledge captured from application owners, as opposed to the ‘as-is’
deployed state of the application
• Audit data can quickly become out of date before the move; increasing the risk of
downtime
• No way to automatically track the progress of the migration during the lifecycle of the
migration project
Taking into account these issues, the data centre migration project can be seriously impacted
by fixing errors on the fly and backing out of moves due to unexpected configuration changes.
Tideway Systems Inc., 2008 Page 6 of 18
4. How does Tideway Tideway Foundation help? Tideway Foundation helps by providing the critical ‘as-is’ view of the estate in a single
repository. Agent-less discovery will rapidly build a view of servers and their configuration,
software running, and dependencies to and between critical business services. Importantly,
Tideway Foundation is able to continue discovery on a daily basis to ensure that the
configuration data is kept up to date right up until the move date.
By grouping servers and software components into logical business services planning and
design decisions can be made with greater confidence, subsequently this data can be used to
de-risk the transition phase significantly.
4.1. Key Benefits
Tideway Foundation provides full configuration information for servers and business services,
as well as many reports and dashboards which aid planning and transition phases as well as
tracking progress of a migration.
• Detailed discovery data per server and business service. Subsequently reduce time,
cost and risk of the project.
• Better visibility of changes that need to be re-planned
• Automatic detailed passport generation per server.
• Upstream and downstream dependencies for business services.
• Hardware reference data and OS & Software EOL – highlight systems that may be
possible candidates for removal/consolidation.
• Lifecycle management views to track migration process in new data centre.
Tideway Systems Inc., 2008 Page 7 of 18
4.2. Tideway Deployment
The following chart describes reporting coverage during a typical Tideway Tideway Foundation
deployment.
Presuming all pre-requisites are met prior to deployment it is possible to attain rapid coverage of
the estate. From the very earliest discovery of the estate useful data can be extracted from
Tideway Foundation.
Agent-less discovery provides a significant head start for data centre migration projects;
coverage can be attained rapidly, and data can be captured and updated on a regular basis.
• IP addresses of devices
• IP to DNS mapping
• Partial default HW and SW reports
• Partial default HW and SW dependencies reports
• Partial host - host visualizations
• Partial SI - SI visualizations
• Partial count of network connections
• Partial utilization and distribution dashboards
• Host count progress line chart
Day 1 Week 1-2 Month 1-2
• Partial HW and SW reports
• Partial HW and SW dependencies reports
• Partial host - host visualizations
• Partial SI - SI visualizations
• Partial count of network connections
• Partial utilization and distribution dashboards
• Software Instance Report with unique SI type and host
• Citrix Servers and Software Instances
• Citrix Servers’ Installed Software Packages
• Complete host - host visualizations
• Complete SI - SI visualizations
• Complete Process-to-process visualizations
• Report for each host including HW and SW info as well as current communications excluding local-only communications
• Utilization and distribution dashboards
Estate coverage
Tideway Systems Inc., 2008 Page 8 of 18
5. Example Output Tideway Foundation supplies various ways to report and consume the discovered data. These
include:
• Management Dashboards
o Graphs and pie charts
o Tabular reports
• Out of the box reports for software
• Custom report capability
• Export Capability to CSV and RDMS
5.1. Full Infrastructure Baseline
Once credentials are available for discovery, Tideway Foundation will rapidly build a baseline
view of the estate; number and type of servers, Operating Systems deployed, hardware vendor
coverage:
Infrastructure breakdown
Track server footprint over time
Identify non-standard OS
Identify virtual servers
Tideway Systems Inc., 2008 Page 9 of 18
High level view
• Hardware vendor
• Services supported
• Link to running software
Contextual data included by
dynamic SQL query or CSV
import
Full OS details; type, version,
patches, packages
OS End of Life & Support details
5.2. Full Server Detail
Full details regarding servers can be viewed and reported upon within Tideway Foundation as
well as exported to CSV and Passport PDFs.
Tideway Systems Inc., 2008 Page 10 of 18
Server detail continued:
NIC Details, links
to switch and port
from CiscoWorks
HBA Details
Tideway Systems Inc., 2008 Page 11 of 18
5.2.1. Example Passport
Tideway Systems Inc., 2008 Page 12 of 18
5.3. Dependency Information
Tideway Foundation will identify dependencies in 3 scenarios:
1. Groups of servers observed communicating
2. Network communications from an individual server and its software components
3. Dependency from a business service perspective
Each of these views provides powerful visibility of the impact of moving servers. Understanding
server and software communication allows better planning and de-risks the migration process.
5.3.1. Group communication
This view is automatically discovered and visualised. Groups of servers that are observed
communicating are generally indicative of a business service being present.
Server Groups communicating:
Tideway Systems Inc., 2008 Page 13 of 18
Drill through to a group of servers:
From the visualisations it is possible to drill through an icon to view the detail regarding the
servers.
Tideway Systems Inc., 2008 Page 14 of 18
Auto generated server & software dependencies
Server
Software Network Communication
5.3.2. Software Communication from a Server
This view is available from each server that has been discovered. The dependency information
is gathered automatically during discovery (subject to pre-requisites being met), and is
automatically visualised.
This view describes the software communication from the server at the top of the image to
software components running on other servers. From this view it is reasonable to infer that if
the software component at the top of the image is moved or stopped it may impact the other
software components and servers that is communicating with.
Tideway Systems Inc., 2008 Page 15 of 18
5.3.3. Business Service Dependency
Using the discovered data described previously, a short modelling exercise produces a pattern
that will automatically identify and group components into logical business services in the
estate. This provides a business perspective of the underlying infrastructure:
Logical Business Service
Software
Components
Servers
Edge network
Tideway Systems Inc., 2008 Page 16 of 18
Once several business services have been modelled it is possible to view dependencies
between business services:
Again, these views enable better understanding of change impact during a migration, and allow
better planning of the transition of critical services.
Mail Hub London Instance
Dependency links to
other Business Services
Tideway Systems Inc., 2008 Page 17 of 18
5.4. Lifecycle Management
Tideway Foundation’s Lifecycle Management feature allows the user to define views on the
discovered data. In this example the user has defined a view that shows the footprint of
physical servers being migrated into a new data centre:
Each line has a link to a server that has been discovered in the new estate. Against each
server is a status; ‘Current’ – meaning that the server has been seen by discovery, and
‘Expected’ – a field that is updated by the user as new servers are alerted to him by discovery.
As servers are introduced into the estate and discovered their initial status will be ‘Unknown’ –
the user checks the migration plan to confirm the move date for the server and whether that
server should be in the estate. If the server has been moved as planned the user can update
the status to ‘Expected’.
This feature allows a fine level of control when reviewing the progress of the project lifecycle.
Additional views can be created to track the migration of business services; ensuring that they
have been migrated and reconfigured correctly.
5.5. Hardware Reference Data
Data centre migrations provide an opportunity to attempt to identify servers that are redundant,
obsolete, candidates for consolidation or virtualisation. Much of the data provided by the
Tideway Foundation baseline helps with these activities. Armed with the data regarding
hardware models, software running, network communication activity it is possible to identify
servers that should be examined in more detail to determine their best use.
Tideway Systems Inc., 2008 Page 18 of 18
Tideway Foundation’s dashboards allow the user to drill straight into this pertinent information.
This dashboard provides various views of server hardware based on different metrics.
Additional hardware data is supplied by Tideway via the monthly Tideway Knowledge Update.
This dashboard provides a breakdown of servers by:
• CPU speed and count
• Host type and RAM
• Compute power by BTU/h (heat output)
• Compute power and Watts (peak power consumption)
• Servers with RAM gap (servers that can have more RAM installed)
Each of these reports provide a list of servers that are potential candidates for optimisation
through consolidation, upgrades or removal.
Breakdown by power consumption
Breakdown by BTU/h
Servers capable of having more
RAM installed