Manpower Calculation

[VSource]

This is for a huge physical to virtual migration activity.

What are the physical task involved (touch services) and how do we do manpower calculation ?

Regards,

[Paul_B1]

Well... it depends :).

Do you know what tool sets you will be using to do the migration? We have found that various different tools work at different levels of effectiveness and drastically change the "hands on time" per migration.

Out of curiosity, what's the definition of "Huge"? 100 servers? 2,000 servers?

[VSource]

The migration has various phases...each phase will have approximately physical 100 server to be virtualised.

BTW, the tool used will be VM Convertor (P2V).

Thanks.

[admin]

You may try to use the VMware Calculator for VI. Vmware consider the conversion effort in the TCO.

http://www.vmware.com/products/vi/calculator.html

[Paul_B1]

The migration has various phases...each phase will

have approximately physical 100 server to be

virtualised.

BTW, the tool used will be VM Convertor (P2V).

Thanks.

This is VERY generic but I would plan on an hour to an hour and a half per server to do the copy and then clean up the VM (remove the ghosted hardware no longer present). It takes us about 45 minutes to do a conversion using VMware's product, then another 15 or so minutes of clean up work. The 45 minutes is the time it actually takes to setup the job and do the copy. Then of course there's application owner testing and such.

There are best practices as to how many P2V's should be streaming to any given host at once (I believe they say only 3 or 4 at a time). We have also had a few servers that haven't worked well with VMware's product so we use Platespin or some other method (ghost).

We have found that P2V from Vmware isn't very good about keeping the network settings, so that usually needs to be re setup and the converter agent uninstalled. I've had mixed results using the stand alone P2V Converter CD (as opposed to installing the agent for "hot" migration).

[VSource]

thanks paul.

[Paul_B1]

No problem and good luck!

Oh, and if you found the posts here helpful or correct could you press the little button indicating that? It helps us posters earn points

[Ken_Cline]

What has turned out to be the most difficult (and time consuming) part of most of the migration projects I've been involved in has absolutely nothing to do with the actual migration. The hardest part is actually identifying the right person to coordinate with to schedule the system (and it's almost never the person identified in the "system of record") - and once you've found the right person, getting a commitment to make the server available on a given date and time to enable the migration, followed by the "user acceptance test" that should be executed following the migration

[christianZ]

For a large migration I would prefer the Platespin PowerConvert -

when you have windows DCs or DB servers it will be hard to use VMWare converter. With PowerConvert you can easily change the hw configuration (e.g. the CPU count !) - not possible with Converter.

We used both - but by critical servers the PowerConvert was better.

[daniel_uk]

Also be prepared to factor that "95% feeling", its the feeling you get when you P2V 95% of a 200GB VM and it fails! at 1AM!

VMware converter ive found is very hardware dependant for migrations so make sure you have tools available like platespin to bail you out if it goes tits up, Platespins helped me many a time when ive had commitments to anti vmware app teams who you only have one chance to prove the technology to!