We at Tech180 have just finished our first server migration, and it was a big one. It took us 3 days, but we successfully migrated an entire business’ infrastructure from one side of the country to the other. The migration consisted of ten virtual servers running off 2 VMware ESX hosts, one Netapp datastore, and two physical servers.
The company, a leading national retailer with over 90 stores Australia wide, was in the process of migrating their Head Office from Perth to Sydney, and needed some specific requirements in order to make sure their business could still function while all their services were offline. As with any retail operation, downtime on any service can have a major negative affect on the business, so during our planning phase, we needed to come up with a solution that would minimise any downtime for the business, but in a cost effective way.
With months of planning out of the way, and a cost effective solution all mapped out, we started backing up the servers in Perth and shutting them down on day one. By the second day we were taking all the hardware out of the server racks and packing them up to be overnighted across the country ready for installation in Sydney the next day. On the morning of the third day, having caught a flight that night, we got to the new Sydney office and started unwrapping all the hardware and getting it into the new server racks. The next step was the moment of truth; we switched on all the hardware and everything successfully powered back up again without incident. All that was required next was to reconfigure certain parts of the virtualisation network, and servers, and the business was back up running from Sydney as if nothing had ever happened. All in all, it was a very successful migration.
If you are planning an office migration and needs assistance moving server hardware and infrastructure, contact us as Tech180 today.
