Tech Notes

I wanted to share a real-life example of how VirtualWisdom can be used to de-risk your migration and consolidation projects:

Recently, one of our customers used VirtualWisdom to help successfully migrate a datacenter, and at the same time, consolidate two mission-critical, Oracle-based applications from two older-generation storage systems to one new storage system.

Pre-migration analysis for the new data center ensured that it was “production” ready.  VirtualWisdom was used to identify naming issues with the zone configuration, an incorrectly configured server from a multipathing perspective, queue depth configuration issues, physical layer problems, and miscellaneous performance concerns.  It’s worth noting that the physical layer issues concerned two links that were found to be borderline within specification at 4Gb, and several other ports that were found to be outside of specification at 8Gb, and were addressed before the migration occurred.  We highly recommend paying particular attention to physical layers issues when migrating to 8Gb SANs, as what worked fine at 4Gb may not work so well at 8Gb.

Before the move, the applications were benchmarked to help increase performance.  During the spin-up of the new site, which occurred on a weekend when traffic was low, VirtualWisdom reported an intermittent latency issue. The latency issue occurred for only a second or two every minute.  The  vendor performance tool that the customer was using could not detect the issue because it was averaging the latency metric and was not granular enough to pick up the anomaly.  The issue was serious enough that the team had to fix it by Monday or they forecasted an outage.  The fall-back plan was to re-deploy on the older storage arrays.  VirtualWisdom, which aggregates metrics to the one-second level, found a process that lasted one second, which was causing the problem.  Once the offending process was identified and remediated, the problem disappeared.  The new site went fully live; the Oracle-based applications functioned as predicted, and VirtualWisdom was able to confirm that the infrastructure performance of the new site, with the consolidated array, met its SLAs.

For more information on how VirtualWisdom can be used to de-risk your migration and consolidation projects, check out this tech brief on private cloud de-risking:  http://www.virtualinstruments.com/files/pdfs/tech-brief-private-cloud.pdf, or this blog on private cloud migration best practices:  http://www.virtualinstruments.com/sanbestpractices/best-practices/three-steps-to-de-risking-migration-to-the-private-cloud/ or this whitepaper on datacenter consolidation best practices at: http://www.virtualinstruments.com/files/pdfs/WP_Storage-Consolidation-Best-Practices.pdf.  If you would like to talk with the customer in this story to learn more, contact your Virtual Instruments account team and they can arrange it for you.