Get This Party Started

Server migrations will be starting within a month. As a pilot, Enquizit has assembled a highly curated list of applications to move. The intent is to start at the lowest end of the risk spectrum: a development server with few dependencies and only users in Wharton Computing. Later on, we’ll migrate systems that are in production, machines used by civilians, and servers running applications with multiple dependencies.

The pilot will move five applications to the cloud:

  • The development instance of the faculty recruiting application
  • The development instance of the Informatica secure agent application
  • Two servers from the Management department, running Remote Desktop Services, Microsoft Office, and SPSS
  • The development instance of the Cloudbees/Jenkins application
  • The development instance of our .NET application environment

The pilot migrations include both Linux and Windows servers. Some of the applications have database dependencies, some have dependencies on authentication, and others have dependencies on Active Directory.

CloudEndure is the tool that will be used to replicate servers in the cloud. A CloudEndure agent will be installed on each server. The agent will mirror the on-premise server’s data to a cloud instance of the server. (The cloud instance will be sized appropriately, based on data collected from the RISC inventory which has been evaluated in Skymap.)

The AWS Migration team–a combination of AWS Professional Services, Enquizit, and the Wharton AWS team–will work with the application owners to schedule the cutover to the cloud instance. There will be an outage of roughly one hour during the cutover. The on-premise server will be shut down and DNS will be reconfigured to point to the cloud instance of the server. The owners and users of the server will test the cloud instance. If everything is working properly our work is done. If the cloud instance is not working properly, it will be shut down and the on-premise instance will be restarted. The DNS configuration will be reverted back to the local instance.

The migration pilot will start the week of April 22nd and will run until June 7th. One application, which may be one or more servers, will move each week. At the end of the pilot seventeen servers from the Vance datacenter will be running in the cloud. After the pilot, we plan to lift-and-shift or lift-and-tinker another ninety-six servers between June 10th and August 16th. That will be a rate of about ten servers a week.