Looking forward

Once we finish testing PowerConvert and some last loadtests we will start with setting up our production environment. The definitive decision on the new SAN has not been taken yet so that could still become exciting should we have some unexpected external influence.

EMC has our preference but there could be some political influence in the direction of IBM. We’re hoping to strike the right deal financially with EMC so the discussion can focus on functionality again.

The purchase of the storage environment has now been classified as being “on the critical path” because it will make or break our planning. Our escape route is to buy yet another disk cage to attach to one of the MSA1000’s we currently have but that would be a waste of the money in the long term and we would only be able to run production on that for a very short time (no redundancy).

Our milestones for the coming period are:

• Ordering production VM hosts: 15-8-06
• Decision on storage: between now and 25-8-06
• First storage array online: between 12-9-06 and 18-9-06
• Writing migration plan: from 7-8-06 to Fri 8-9-06
• Start of migration: Mon 18-9-06

What not to virtualize

Just a quick update to let you know that we will start testing PowerConvert this week. Tests will probably continue into next week but things are a bit slow due to the holidays at the moment. If all goes well with PowerConvert I will start ordering the first two production environment machines from HP.

We have also made a list of the things we will not be migrating:

• The Faxserver
• The Exchange Servers (not until full 64 bit host support so we can upgrade to Exchange 2007)
• The Cisco Callmanager servers

These are the things we know for sure. If anything changes I will post it here ofcourse.