Phase 4: Server and Application Migration
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pHase iV: seRVeR and appliCation migRation pan Once the risk and effort analysis has taken place, it is critical to begin thinking about how to design a standard operating environment (SOE) upon which to migrate. An SOE is an organization’s standard implementation of the core operating system and middleware components. It can include the base operating system, the JEE container, custom configurations, standard applications used within an organization, software updates, and service packs. Once an application set has been identified, a standardized configuration based on an SOE approach will be created for rapid and consistent deployment. An SOE configuration consists of a set of tested hardware, tested software, and configurations deployed within a JBoss environment. The SOE configuration will be fully aligned to your technical and business requirements, dramatically reduce deployment time, simplify maintenance, increase stability, and reduce support and management costs. In some cases, multiple SOEs will be required and the next step in the migration plan is to determine how many different server configurations will be necessary to support all the applications after the migration. Multiple server configurations may be necessary because different applications require conflicting configurations, throughput versus latency, special deployments, or because the expected load requires special hardware for some applications. The key is to keep the number of configurations as small as possible while meeting the functional and non-functional goals of your environment. Once the number of configurations has been determined, it will be important to know which applications will be deployed to which servers. From this point, configuration of the individual applications can begin. Individual applications can be configured to use different class loaders, interceptor stacks, caches, URLs, and many other configuration options. Plan to provide training for the team to compensate for knowledge gaps that were identified in the earlier risk and effort assessment. With the migration of applications scheduled, training can be planned to coincide with the need for that knowledge in the migration effort. Arranging the training schedule so that the migration team first encounters the problem, works with it, and then gets training in the relevant technology can be a very efficient way of advancing the migration project. Cost estimation and timeline finalization will be the next items to address. Cost estimation will focus on the following areas: • Cost of staging hardware that will be used for testing servers and configurations • Cost of developing extensions to existing open source software to fill gaps when moving off proprietary software • Migrating applications can be grouped for costestimation based on whether they need source code changes or just simple configuration changes • Training costs • Savings from reduced software costs • Savings from re-deployed hardware.