We are now three months into this project and tomorrow should be a milestone day, loads of the older equipment will be leaving the site – some going to Computers for Africa and some going to scrap. It’s kind of sad to see a business down size this way, but unfortunately it’s a fact of modern day life.
So now we have to take the next steps and get the remaining servers virtualised where we can, or if they can’t be moved then prepared for relocation. This should be where it starts to get into the nitty gritty of the preparation and planning, it’s the place where things can go horribly wrong. The key to this preparatory part of the operation is discovery, it’s important to understand the data flows and the interconnectivity of all the interfaces.
Fortunately we’ll be down to the bare bones of whats moving, not something that we have as a starting point very often. I have started the discovery phase on some of the systems and am fairly confident that the spec for the virtualised systems is well understood, however the interface discovery has yet to be started and as we don’t really have total control over the networking stuff I think it may be a bit of a struggle without the assistance of the European team.
Anyway tomorrow will be the start of the important work, so we’ll see how it all goes – at about 7:30 AM tomorrow. As they say we’ll kick the tyres and light the fires, then it should accelerate to the finishing line.