Xtravirt — Twist or Stick – Assessing how appropriate a Cloud...

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Twist or Stick – Assessing how appropriate a Cloud Migration is

by Curtis Brown

I was recently on an engagement to assist a customer with their decision process as to the future direction of their IT environment.  In particular, they were keen to look at two areas – migration to a Cloud provider, and the state of End User Compute, possibly with a view to moving this up to a cloud solution too.

The Assessment

As with any sort of assessment process, we needed information.  This came from a number of sources:

Capacity Planning and Inventory Tools

To gather hard facts and figures, a number of tools were installed and used.  For a basic capture of the existing desktop estate, Lakeside Systrack was used.  This provided useful data in terms of application utilisation as well as performance metrics.

For the server estate, two tools were used.  As the customer was already largely hosted on a VMware vSphere estate, VMware Capacity Planner was leveraged in conjunction with Sonar, an analytics tool developed by Xtravirt (take a look at https://sonarhub.com - well worth it.). image

The former gave useful metrics on the application servers in the estate, including both virtual and the few legacy physical systems, whist the latter provided immediately usable analytics data on the VMware vSphere estate.  Being presented in a readily usable format was particularly valuable in the turn-around time for compiling findings in the assessment as a whole.

Talking to IT

Who better to talk to about a company’s IT than the team who keep it fed and watered?  The IT team were able to go a step further than mere facts and figures, discussing how the estate holds together as a solution for business needs as well as future plans and existing pain points.  This meant engaging with different subject matter owners – such as desktop support, helpdesk, networks and so on.  A key player here was also a discussion with the CIO and IT manager to get a direction at the strategic level.

Talking to the business

While talking to IT is undoubtedly valuable, IT represents a somewhat vested interest.  At the end of the day, IT provides a service to the business, so engaging with business unit leads to gain a feel for their requirements from IT and whether they were being met provides valuable insight into the perception of IT in the business as a whole.

The Findings

Findings for an assessment like this will vary from customer to customer.  Some will be well suited to take the plunge into Cloud compute, others will be better served by staying with a hosted provider or even on premise.  In this latter case, it may be that the customer use case might suit Cloud provisioning, but they may not be ready for it with respect to the logistics or technology involved – for example, the network topology may need re-working first.

In the case of this customer, the key business driver from both IT and the business as a whole was that IT was seen as expensive and underperforming.

Delving deeper, it was found that the server estate, barring a few minor issues, was quite straight forward.  Technically, there were few reasons not to migrate to cloud.  Connectivity was well provisioned and the largely virtualised estate would migrate relatively easily.  Indeed, the somewhat elastic needs of the business were well suited to one of Cloud compute’s key strengths - the ability to provide a compute-on-demand model.

The limiting factor was the existing desktop solution.  Predominantly VDI, it lacked a cohesive managed application strategy.  All applications were hard-grafted into one of a large number of template desktops, each requiring individual attention to maintenance.  In addition, the underlying hardware was not well suited to the numbers involved, particularly with respect to storage.  The combination of these two factors was such that IT was perceived as slow and unwieldy to the point that the business were considering returning to thick clients.

Of course, moving to thick clients, while possible, would only emphasise further the difficulties with applications.  Also, in a surprise to the IT team, the business feedback showed a strongly positive response to the flexibility of VDI – particularly the ability to roam sessions between sites and even home working.

The Recommendation

So, to conclude, we recommended that Cloud was indeed the way ahead, but initially only for server workloads.  With End User Compute, refining the existing solution and deploying a supporting application strategy was suggested.  It was agreed that this was a healthy approach as it would also be less disruptive than an all-at-once cloud migration.

Xtravirt went on to assist with the customer’s tender process, supporting them through this and beyond into delivery.

Although we do a lot of consultancy around the design and delivery of solutions, Xtravirt also provide consultancy to help customers, as a trusted advisor, to guide their future IT strategy.  If you would like to find out more about how Xtravirt can help your organisation

contact us

today.

**About the Author **

Curtis Brown joined the Xtravirt consulting team in October 2012. His specialist areas include End User Compute solutions and Virtual Infrastructure design and implementation with particular strength in VDI, storage integration, backup and Disaster Recovery design/implementation. He is a VMware vExpert 2016.

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