Change Management Policy

[lldmka]

I recently submitted a change request to upgrade our 35 production ESX hosts to v3.5, stating that the upgrade will be transparent to the guest servers as they will be migrated (VMotioned) off each host prior to it being upgraded. To my amazement I was told that the upgrade will require the approval of all application owners (applications that run within the guest servers). This is despite the fact that I have already put the upgrade through a Release Management process, which involved upgrading a lab environment of 7 ESX hosts and 100 guest servers.

I wasn't able to convince management that all guest servers of the same O/S are in effect identical (in terms of virtual hardware and drivers) and that if the host upgrade didn't adversely affect any guest servers in the lab, then the same would hold true for the production environment. I intend to argue this point further.

In the meantime, I'm interested to hear of others experiences with Change Management.

[Jasemccarty]

What version of ESX are you running in production now?

We have a pretty stringent change management process. Fortunately, we are the system owners, and the application owners don't have a say in the matter.

Jase McCarty

http://www.jasemccarty.com

Co-Author of VMware ESX Essentials in the Virtual Data Center

(ISBN:1420070274) from Auerbach

[lldmka]

We're running 3.0.2 in production at the moment.

I challenged change management today to justify the additional approval, pointing out that equivalent approval isn't required for changes to Active Directory, Microsoft Clusters, Storage Virtualization (SAN Volume Controller) etc - but haven't had a reply yet. I wouldn't be surprised if they introduce new approval requirements for those environments now!

I can see I'm going to have to put together a technical presentation to convince them that a host upgrade won't impact the guest servers.

[Texiwill]

Hello,

If you have enough capacity for the VMs on a single host to run on other hosts, then a system upgrade would not affect anything. HOwever, your test results from your test lab that matches production would be the most telling results. I would agree you have to convince them.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

====

Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education.

CIO Virtualization Blog: http://www.cio.com/blog/index/topic/168354

As well as the Virtualization Wiki at http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization

[gary1012]

Does your change management process require a fail back plan? If so, I would propose that your application VMs be moved to the new 3.5 hosts on a phased basis with DEV/TEST/low impact VMs going first. If no issue, then move PRD. If you do have issues (which I doubt will happen) with DEV/TEST, fail back to 3.0.2. Remind your management that 3.0.2 will quickly be going end of support. SO, your choice is to migrate or not to have security patches.

[lldmka]

I had a small win - virtual machine application owners are now only notified of the ESX upgrades, they are no longer change approvers. I will live with that, although will be interested to see how an objection from an application owner is handled (will surely happen).

I was tempted to put together a technical presentation illustrating that all virtual machines of the same OS are basically identical and that if one isn't affected by an upgrade none will be. But I have too many other priorities and it will only frustrate me if I am challenged on technical points by non-technical staff.

Thanks for your opinions.

[mcowger]

Interesting - we have change management procedures too, but our application owners dont get to dictate policy ever. For something thats transparent to them, its unlikely they would even get a notification, much less approval authority.

--Matt

[ChrisDearden]

I'd dream of a life that easy Matt

[mcowger]

We're hiring

--Matt

[joboo12]

Yea, the application teams pretty much run the show where I am at. Especially the SAP folks!