tips and tricks from the trenches for migrating to a virtual private cloud

Migrating Complex On-Premises Systems to a Managed Private Cloud

FROM THE TRENCHES:

Christian KellyDirector of Technology, Xantrion Inc.

• Founded in 2000 to bring enterprise IT to small and midsized organizations

• One of the fastest growing companies in the Bay Area for the past 5 years

• Among the top 50 worldwide MSPs

ABOUT XANTRION

• Premium partner for companies such as Microsoft

• 45-person technical team

• 5000 end users supported

• 900 servers managed

• About service, not sales

ABOUT XANTRION

• High availability of services

• Predictable costs; no CAPex required for upgrades

• Datacenter-level security

• Business continuity and disaster recovery

• Managed support

WHY CLIENTSWANT TO MOVE TO

the cloud

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• Negligible disruption to client during migration

• End user experience is not degraded

• System performance is maintained or improved

WHAT DOES SUCCESS

look like?

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• Understand applications and user behavior

• Understand application interdependencies

• Latency sensitive applications?

• Thick applications which connect directly to non WAN optimized protocols?

UNDERSTAND

the client

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• Understand applications ability to run in Remote Desktop Session Host (RDSH) sessions

• What if anything gets left on premises?

• Active Directory, file and print servers

• This can be the most time consuming step and can take weeks with a large client

UNDERSTAND

the client

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Staged migration sounds “safer” but it can be fraught with issues

• Systems which don’t move together can have unpredictable behavior

• RDSH / Citrix servers not adjacent to all applications

• Isolating issues that arise can be hard due to the amount of change

STAGED MIGRATIONVS. REPLICATION AND CUTOVER

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Replication and cutover can simplify the process

• Spend more time in preparation, very short cutover

• Gives an easy “fail back” if things don’t go as planned

STAGED MIGRATIONVS. REPLICATION AND CUTOVER

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Try to isolate and complete tasks in silos to help pinpoint if something “breaks” or users complain• Virtualization

• Remote access

• IP readdressing

• Seeding/ Migration

• Testing

• Cutover

ISOLATE CHANGES TO THE ENVIRONMENTDO ONE THING AT A TIME

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• Removes platform dependencies

• Allows use of Hypervisor based replication

• Why wouldn’t you?

VIRTUALIZEEVERYTHING ONSITE

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Demonstrate that applications work through chosen remote access technology from within the existing environment including:• Printing• Application Performance • File access• Desktops with mixed local vs. remote applications

Migrate users to RDSH/Citrix while solution is still on premises

DEPLOY REMOTE ACCESS SOLUTIONON PREMISES

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• Solve IP problems locally before you move

• Many systems and applications have hardcoded IP address

• Printers / Scanners

• Older applications

• Custom websites

IP ADDRESS SYSTEMS WITH DATACENTER SUBNETWHILE STILL ON PREMISES (ROUTE THROUGH LAYER3 DEVICE)

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• You want to deal with one set of problems at a time

• Should you try and span at Layer2?

• Adds complexity

• Not something we want to leave in place long term

IP ADDRESS SYSTEMS WITH DATACENTER SUBNETWHILE STILL ON PREMISES (ROUTE THROUGH LAYER3 DEVICE)

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Some of the metrics to evaluate:

• Storage (primary and backup)

• IOPS

• Compute

• Licensing

• Bandwidth

USE MONITORINGTO UNDERSTAND RESOURCE REQUIREMENTS

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UNDERSTAND BANDWIDTH NEEDED FOR PRODUCTION

• Client must have redundant internet connections

• If you’re going to move data offsite you’d better always have internet access

• Best to have different types of internet connections

• Fiber and microwave

• Ethernet Over Coax and cable

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• Understand how much data you can move over a pipe of a given size

• Latency will affect maxim throughput

• You’re going to need adequate bandwidth, a T1 isn’t going to cut it

UNDERSTAND BANDWIDTH NEEDED FOR REPLICATION

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• Need matching SANs in datacenter and client location

• Generally more complex networking requirements

• Expensive

REPLICATION OPTIONS

SAN-BASED REPLICATION• Hardware independent; low cost

• Can be more efficient with smaller block sizes (depends on SAN)

• Replication deltas can be predicted

• Seeding

• Multi-threading TCP streams

HYPERVISOR-BASED REPLICATION

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• You should bring up servers in an isolated environment in the datacenter for testing and validation

• Give client remote access for end to end testing applications and systems

• Some things can’t be fully tested like mail flow

TESTING

PRE CUTOVER TESTING• Have a monitoring system in place to

alert you to issues you may have overlooked

• Have a test matrix to tell you the move was successful

FINAL TESTING

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FINAL CUTOVER

• DNS propagation times

• Mail Queuing

• VPN tunnel / remove temporary subnet from LAN

CONSIDERATIONS FAILBACK PLAN

• Have go/no go checks in place

• Don’t allow irreversible changes to environment such as mail flow or application updates

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Citrix

Private Cloud

StagingNetwork

Production

FOSTER CITY

MIGRATION OF SYSTEMS

Citrix

Private Cloud

StagingNetwork

Production

FOSTER CITY

MIGRATION OF SYSTEMS

Citrix

Private Cloud

StagingNetwork

Production

FOSTER CITY

MIGRATION OF SYSTEMS

Private Cloud

StagingNetwork

Production

Citrix

FOSTER CITY

MIGRATION OF SYSTEMS

• 300 users

• 40+ servers (300GB RAM)

• 10+ TB of data

CASE STUDYCLOUD MIGRATION

After two months of preparation, client was migrated overnight with under 9 hours of total downtime

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Understand the legal risks before you

move.

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• Can the cloud provider’s backup systems meet your data retention plan requirements?

• Are you able to access systems as required to perform security audits

• Does the vendor have audited attestation of security and privacy practices which meet your requirements?

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Q&A