Migrating to the Cloud Migration in Five Steps

Transcription

1 Migrating to the Cloud Migration in Five Steps

2 Table of Content Introduction 3 Designing your Virtual Data Center 3 Auditing Your Exesting Environment 4 Building Your Virtual Data Center 5 Migration in five Steps 5 Step 1: Select an Operating System 6 Step 2: Install Applications and Services 7 Step 3: Migrate Your Data 8 Step 4: Test Your New Site 8 Step 5: Move Your Live Site 9 10 Tips For A Successful Project 10 Your Migration Plan 11 Next Steps 12

3 Introduction You ve learned about ProfitBricks advantages. You know that you can get server, network, and storage based on your needs not based on pre-packaged configurations. You ve done the analysis on how much money you will save with ProfitBricks. Now, you re ready to get started with your ProfitBricks account. Whether you re an expert, or you re new to the cloud, having a good plan for migrating your existing infrastructure to the ProfitBricks cloud will ensure a successful, low-risk, and cost-effective migration. This guide covers best practices for migrating to the ProfitBricks cloud from your legacy physical or virtual infrastructure. A migration plan usually includes four steps. Let s look at each of these steps in detail. Designing your Virtual Data Center Designing and provisioning your Virtual Data Center with servers, storage, load balancers, firewalls, and associated networking is easy using the ProfitBricks Data Center Designer (DCD). Before you get started, though, you face a challenge: how do you decide what your cloud environment should look like? Determining the best architecture for your system is key to success in the cloud. The first step: ensuring you have a good understanding of your existing environment. ProfitBricks Data Center Designer

4 Auditing Your Exesting Environment Before you get started on your new Virtual Data Center, it s important to have a thorough map of your existing environment. How many servers are in use? Do you need load balancers? Do you need multiple subnets? You will need to collect information from your existing servers and network equipment, including: How many servers are in use? What are the current memory/cpu configurations of existing servers? What are the storage requirements (performance and disk space) for your applications and/or databases? Remenber, the more time you spend assessing your envoronment, the more successful you migration will be. What network interfaces does each server have? How do applications on your servers interact what are the dependencies? How do your end-users access the application? Be sure to engage each of the stakeholders in your organization. That may include resources from application, database, network, security, storage, and systems teams. Getting Started - ProfitBricks Data Center Designer (DCD) - YouTube Video

5 Building Your Virtual Data Center Once you have gathered this information, you can get started with Data Center Designer. Sketch out the networks, servers, storage, and load balancers you will need. Don t worry about getting it perfect the first time: remember, you can always scale servers and change network configurations at any time. Use this virtual whiteboard for a final architecture review with your team; once it s finalized, just click to provision. Migration in five Steps Once your environment is designed and provisioned, you ll need to migrate from your old systems to your new systems. Of course, you ll want your migration to be as seamless as possible, avoiding any downtime for your customers. With careful planning, your migration should be nearly invisible to your users. Once your environment is designed and provisioned, you ll need to migrate from your old systems to your new systems A migration ususally takes five steps: 1. Selecting an Operating System Image 2. Install Applications and Services 3. Migrate Your Data 4. Test Your New Site 5. Move Your Customers

6 Step 1: Select an Operating System For your operating system build, you may choose to import an existing image, use a pre-defined ProfitBricks image, or build your own image. Each has advantages and disadvantages, as summarized in the table below. OS Strategy Pros Cons Import Existing Image In some limited circumstances, may be an easy alternative for copying programs and data at the same time. Exporting your existing VM may be difficult or impossible depending on your current provider. You may encounter compatibility issues if your current provider is using non-standard virtualization techniques. Copying your existing VM image over the network may be inefficient, as it includes operating system files which are already available from ProfitBricks templates. May require outage to your existing infrastructure in order to capture a valid image of your current VM. Use A Profitbricks Image Easy and quick pre-defined OS images are available for many versions of Windows and various Linux distributions. Darüber hinaus haben Sie unter Umständen den Wunsch, die vorhandenen Images zusätzlich an Ihre Bedürfnisse anzupassen. You may wish to do some additional customization of stock images. Build Your Own Image Most flexible approach. ProfitBricks provides ISO installation media for Windows and Linux, which you can use for your baseline installation. Additional up-front work required. Once you ve selected an OS image (and uploaded any custom ones), you can deploy that image to virtual machines on ProfitBricks by simply selecting the image in Data Center Designer, found in a host s storage settings.

7 Step 2: Install Applications and Services Now that you have built your OS image, you can start installing your applications and services on your ProfitBricks instances. Again, you have a few possible strategies: if you imported a full virtual machine, your applications may be included in that VM; if you run DevOps tools such as Chef, you can deploy with your existing tools; or, you may install applications manually. Application Migration Strategy VM-based installation Pros As with OS images, in some limited circumstances, may be an easy alternative for copying programs and data at the same time. Cons Exporting your existing VM may be difficult or impossible depending on your current provider. You may encounter compatibility issues if your current provider is using non-standard virtualization techniques. Copying your existing VM image over the network may be inefficient, as it includes operating system files which are already available from ProfitBricks templates. May require outage to your existing infrastructure in order to capture a valid image of your current VM Tools-based Installation If you re already using DevOps tools such as Chef, migration is simple. Ensures that new system is a perfect, complete implementation of your environment. If you re using Chef to manage your environment, you ll love our knife plugin. Read more about Chef, and the ProfitBricks Chef integration, in our blog post #Chef Integration Comes To ProfitBricks. You must already be using, or must adopt, a DevOps tool. Manual Installation Most flexible approach will work regardless of the setup of your current environment Requires manual work to ensure applications are installed and configured properly Replicating databases requires some knowledge of database-specific replication technologies.

8 Step 3: Migrate Your Data Now that your servers and applications are set up, it s time to migrate your data. We find that most customers use a combination of file synchronization technologies such as rsync and database replication technologies. You ll find pointers to documentation on each of these options at our support site; as always, contact us if we can help. IMost users copy static data, and pre-stage dynamic data, in advance of a migration window. If you ve done this, then during the migration window, you can simply set your site to read-only mode, finalize the migration of any dynamic data, and then bring up your site on the ProfitBricks cloud. Cloud computing providers virtualize, allocate and architect their specific platforms differently from one another. Performance thrives with some services and suffers with others. Step 4: Test Your New Site Testing your new site before it goes live is a critical, and often omitted, step in the migration process. Before you migrate your users, ensure you have completed a full QA cycle in your new environment. Ensure that all of your usual monitoring tools are in place, and not reporting any issues. And ensure your standard operations processes, such as backup and scheduled tasks, are in place.

9 Step 5: Move Your Live Site You ve created your Virtual Data Center, installed your applications and services, staged static and dynamic data, and thoroughly tested. Now comes the fun part! A typical migration would involve the following steps: Complete a final readiness validation of the new site Now that your servers and applications are set up, it s time to migrate your data. Notify stakeholders of migration schedules Reduce DNS Time-To-Live (TTL) for quick updates on the day of the migration Convert the site into read-only mode Finalize data migration, making new site the authoritative source for files and databases Update DNS to point your users to the new site Normalize the newly-live site (taking out of read-only mode) The details of these steps, of course, depend on your application but you should consider this general outline as you develop your own plan. Now comes the fun part!.

10 10 Tips For A Successful Project 1. Select applications for migration carefully. Consider which applications will work best in a cloud environment, and consider migrating smaller or less critical applications first to ensure you have tested the migration process. 2. Engage all of the application stakeholders, including developers, vendors, operations staff, and end-users when and where appropriate. 3. Don t forget to test your full application and data stack before making your site live including all of your existing monitoring and QA tools. 4. Pre-stage static and dynamic data to avoid lengthy data synchronization during the migration. 5. Reduce DNS time-to-live (TTL) well before the day of your migration, ensuring endusers are directed to your new site in a timely manner. 6. Check with your customers and vendors for IP-address-based restrictions; ensure your new IPs are included in any relevant firewall configurations. 7. If you re concerned about redundancy for your application, you should create servers spread across ProfitBricks availability zones. See our support site for more information about using availability zones. 8. Regularly create snapshots of your disks. Snapshots allow you to restore your server to a point-in-time backup, and give you the peace of mind that you can always roll back to a known-good point in time.. 9. If you feel snapshots don t offer enough protection for your needs, consider off-site backups. See our support site or contact us for backup best-practice recommendations. 10. Remember, we re here to help! Whether you re looking for information about best practices, or need help with a specific technology, don t hesitate to reach out to us!

11 Your Migration Plan Step 1: Selecting an Operating System Image Step 2: Install Applications and Services Step 3: Migrate Your Data Step 4: Test Your New Site Step 5: Move Your Users ProfitBricks GmbH Greifswalder Strasse Berlin, Germany Phone: +49 (0) Fax: +49 (0) URL: ProfitBricks