Consolidating or exiting your data center is a complex and high-stakes initiative. Despite the many benefits of moving to the cloud, lifting and shifting workloads without a clear understanding of dependencies between workloads or without addressing underlying technical debt or security vulnerabilities can result in bigger, more expensive problems in the long term.
In our experience working with customers across the globe, we at VMware Tanzu Labs (formerly Pivotal Labs) have found that many folks believe that by simply migrating to the cloud, many of their security problems will diminish and that their operations will suddenly become faster and more efficient. However, often when we analyze a customer’s portfolio, we find hundreds—if not thousands—of Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) that should be addressed before moving to the cloud. Our analysis also often uncovers many critical insights involving dependencies, utilization, and risk.
We know how powerful this type of data can be, especially when directed at a massive undertaking such as data center consolidation and cloud migration. Today, we’re excited to announce a new service aimed at addressing the complexity of data center initiatives. This packaged consulting service enables you with powerful tooling, information, and guidance to make better decisions faster.
During this consulting engagement, Tanzu Labs consultants provide deep technical insight into your existing virtual infrastructure to identify areas of risk that require mitigation (like security, licensing, dependencies, and compatibility) as part of a data center consolidation or migration initiative. We leverage fast and sophisticated tooling such as VMware Aria and Cloud Suitability Analyzer to collect data about your security posture, workload dependencies, and utilization across the data center. Our consultants can derive insight from this data, harnessing proven practices to map your data center with your business outcomes in mind to help you develop a smarter, more actionable path forward.
Use cases for data center analysis by Tanzu Labs
In addition to surfacing important data center information, this consulting engagement guides customers on how to prioritize mitigations and address technical debt as part of a data center consolidation or migration initiative through four main steps:
• Discovering areas of inefficiency and risk across your portfolio
• Mapping application workloads to help inform logical move groups
• Validating application compatibilities with intended cloud landing zones
• Prioritizing areas to mitigate prior to execution of a change initiative
Sample insight
One of the most exciting parts of this Tanzu Labs engagement is the ability to explore the findings with new interactive HTML-based reports that can provide in-depth insights. During each engagement, we generate numerous visualizations using information from your data center to help you make the most educated decisions possible. Here are a few samples:
Flag vulnerabilities at an application level to improve security posture and reduce risk of attack.
Visualize and represent VM-to-VM communication patterns over specified ports across your data center.
Plot VM consumption by databases to mitigate migration risk and improve load balancing.
Define logical migration move groups based on dependencies, workload patterns, and network paths.
As demonstrated in these examples, we can take massive amounts of information from your data center and turn it into easily consumable insights, and our expert consultants can enable you to put those insights into action.
Ultimately, we know how difficult and complex data center consolidation and cloud migration can be, and this consulting engagement can give you the information you need to develop a path forward based on your intended business outcomes. To learn more, contact an expert. To learn more about our team, visit Tanzu Labs.
