Martin talks about seven key areas to watch when deploying virtual infrastructure in order to keep end-user perceptions in line with reality and to not pre-emptively blame virtualization for other infrastructure issues.
Blade Watch » Key issues with vmware.
Proactively resolve issues which might cause delays or problems with the consolidation, life’s too short, and since perception remains key it’s important. Use the migration time to improve the servers you consolidate, clear down those files, check the configurations, check the patch revisions, the layered components, and most of all above else ensure your network connection is as close to ‘production’ i.e, development as possible. There’s no point migrating 10 servers from 100/full to 10/half if the users are going to complain about network speeds.
I’ll give you an example, when migrating your windows 2000 DL360’s, some of them may have 256mb ram, and a 4gb drive for C. Double the ram memory, increase the C drive to a reasonable size so you aren’t visiting them later causing an outage which will be associated with IT, with vmware.
