migration tools
Edwin Yuen, a Senior Technical Product Manager at Microsoft’s Integrated Virtualization team, recently posted a blog on storage migration in a virtualized environment. Why is this so important?
- Migrations of any type can be some of the most difficult tasks businesses face and require plenty of careful planning, planned downtime, and lots of meetings. Once you take the workload and deploy it in a virtual machine, the game changes and the migration task is greatly simplified.
- A short term gain with this approach is that it makes the administrator’s job a heck of a lot easier and long term benefit is that this all happens in an automated way—transparent to the business based on policies that the application and line of business owners have predetermined based on security, availability, performance, etc.
- As users “crawl, walk, run” converting from the physical world to the virtual world, they typically move from a good, better, best approach (i.e., ESG speaks with users that deploy server virtualization on DAS and/or local disk, quickly see the benefits of virtualization, standardize on a “virtualize first” policy, and then purchase a SAN as part of their virtualized infrastructure). It then becomes critical that tools are in place to help them make the migration as seamless and transparent as possible.
Imagine for a minute that you have an application that only requires Tier 1 disk performance one week of the month. Why should the VM continue to consume Tier 1 capacity during the other three weeks? It shouldn’t! In a virtualized environment with storage migration tools, you can begin to see the advantage of moving that same VM to Tier 2 storage during the three weeks of the month that it does not require the performance. Everything remains online and available. Now that’s efficiency!
