by Thomas Crowe (Red Hat)
A key component to a successful migration is a “migration mission statement.” The migration mission statement’s purpose is to summarize the key parts of a migration into a succinct, simply-communicated format that results in a clearly defined migration goal that is easily measurable for success. A sample migration mission statement could be:
Migrate the Acme Order Processing java application from the current proprietary IBM hardware running AIX and WebSphere into a cloud infrastructure running Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Application Server; in order to provide better TCO and ROI, as well as provide increased scalability and reliability. The migration should be performed during non-peak hours, have minimal downtime requirements, and provide for rollback if necessary.
Generally speaking, there are several factors that go into planning and executing a successful migration project. But by answering the following questions, a significant amount of the information necessary for a successful migration can be gathered.
What?
The most basic question to initially ask is simply, “What is being migrated?” This simple question sets the stage for gathering the additional information that is required. Is the migration moving all services from one server to another? Maybe it is migrating an application from one application server to another, or migrating storage from one array to another. Each of these scenarios are going to have unique data-gathering requirements that need to be understood in order to successfully plan and ultimately execute a successful migration.
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