This article discusses how to use the Cloud to streamline the design and planning of on-premise server consolidation projects.
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. A server consolidation project is a significant undertaking, and IT teams will need to answer several weighty questions while planning for one. Can servers be consolidated more efficiently? If so, what is the cost and timeline for doing so? How can we adjust parameters like CPU, memory and storage if our estimates turn out to be incorrect? How will we handle R&D and testing for the new systems? And, most importantly, if we answer any of these questions incorrectly, how much will that impact the timeline and budget for the project? It’s possible to answer these questions by using the Cloud as a sandbox environment to test design assumptions and validate ways of re-organizing and consolidating servers. Ultimately the servers will remain hosted on-premise, the cloud is just used as a placeholder in the planning and design phase of the project. Here’s how I recommend approaching the project. I suggest a “lift and shift” to create a clone of the final target system in the Cloud, but not a re-engineering any components into cloud-native equivalents: the same number of LPARs, same memory/disk/CPU allocations, same file system structures, same exact IP addresses, same exact hostnames, and network subnets, etc. IT can now use cloud benefits like fast creation of duplicates, ephemeral longevity, software-defined networking, and API automation. As design principles are finalized based on research performed on the cloud version of the system, those findings can be applied to the on-prem final buildout. IT can reuse existing on-prem assets as the foundation for cloud components to speed this process along. IT can use tools like «alt-disk-copy» to take snapshots of root and data volume groups and move them to LPARs running in the cloud. They can also use existing on-prem mksysb images to build LPARs in the cloud. After moving the on-prem assets to be tested into the cloud, IT should assemble all the LPARs representing an “Environment” and save them as a single object called a Template.
