VMware recommends the migration Center of Excellence to plan these critical services so they can be delivered effectively and repeatedly throughout the VMware customer base with as little deviation from normal as possible. Useful training tools can be developed in a Migration COE, determining the best fit for each phase of the migration for each customer and application. As described by the reference implementation in this document, starting simple and planning functionality from end-to-end while expanding the reference environment is a wise approach. This allows you to match individual migration use cases mapped to particular source application attributes while allowing for infrastructure preparation. Because of the complexities involved with the tools, provisioning of the tools, infrastructure, and the migration process itself, enabling those stakeholders involved is also a critical feature of the COE.

After the COE is established with migration tools and use cases, you must map physical and logical dependencies across all of the layers and facets. This is the precursor for process analyses to reveal the limiting factors and is the first order in planning the migration operational models. Often one of the most prominent factors is the cutover time windows, which drive Recovery Time Objectives (how long before an application must be available in the new environment) and Recovery Point Objectives (how much time worth of transactions can be missed during the outage). While not exactly disaster recovery in nature, (where concepts such as RTO and RPO are typically addressed), in a migration it is possible to capture a delta of transactions from the source instance to the target, often times at a block level that is transparent to the application and database. The bandwidth and latency of the migration network as well as the size and frequency of potential changes to those datasets require careful analysis and testing. Verify that the cutover can meet the required timing objectives along with any mechanisms that are used for data integrity.

Like any other service, migration needs a clearing house, a funnel that looks at the types of migrations required and creates orders to both provision the tools and infrastructure necessary to accommodate them. It also requires detailed operational plans on how to support different types of migration with tiers of support for different migration tools as well as discreet areas of infrastructure supporting the migration. These must be “on call” during scheduled migration windows of pertinent types so that roadblocks that might otherwise back up other migrations and their dependencies can be resolved.

Updates for the vCloud Connector appliances can be retrieved from the administrative web interface on port 5480 and scheduled for download (with adequate connectivity). VMware has released several new versions of vCloud Connector to address critical vulnerabilities in both Java and glibc. Details on those releases are located in the following links: