Downtime is the biggest challenge enterprises face when migrating from physical to virtual environments.
So says Mike Khattab, VP sales: growth markets at Vision Solutions, who notes that during the initial wave of virtualisation, organisations focused on non-critical workloads, where extended downtime might be acceptable.
However, he says, as businesses virtualise more critical workloads, downtime is not acceptable and must be minimised.
"Businesses rely on these virtualised systems more and more every day, both for customer-facing applications and mission-critical internal applications."
Khattab advises the key to making migration successful is proper planning, using the right tools, and engaging the experts that have experience in doing migrations.
Planning and executing the actual migration can require a tremendous amount of co-ordination across an enterprise, he explains, and this is further complicated by the fact that it needs to be as non-disruptive as possible.
"Testing migrated workloads to validate that they work, but also that they are communicating and operating properly with other dependent applications, is a daunting task which requires lots of planning," says Khattab.
He points out that because companies now have a heterogeneous mix of virtual platforms, in case of disaster, they need to prepare to recover multiple platforms.
Therefore, it is important that business continuity plans account for virtual platforms. By using virtualisation to support business continuity, costs and complexities can be reduced significantly, says Khattab.
Khattab believes migrations are complex and organisations should turn to experts in the field for help and not try to do it all on their own.
"A migration partner can help you plan out the process, including discovery of applications and their dependencies, selection and sizing of the virtual platform ? migration planning and execution, and also testing to validate that the migration was successful," concludes Khattab.
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