The motivations are strong and compelling when making the choice to move towards virtualization as the solution for your data center.

Some of the factors include:

• Lower energy costs
• Greatly reduced data center physical footprint.
• More efficient use of hardware resources
• High availability
• Business continuity / easier disaster recovery
• Lower admin to server ratio

Before the migration is to move forward a detailed audit of current equipment, platforms, applications, etc must take place. All computing resources must be properly documented and enumerated. All backups need to be made current. If hardware is going to be re-tasked and used in the new virtualization schema, thorough testing needs to be done to assure full functionality and reliability.

Thorough preparation in the form diagramming, establishing documented process flows, and devising effective storage strategies is directly relational to the effectiveness and efficiency of your virtual migration and the resultant infrastructure. The planning stage is a good time to implement new ideas that will assist in ease of administration and further data center expansion. As with any IT infrastructure the complexity scales with data center size. Depending on the size of the data center, the virtual migration can be rolled out in phases to ease the transition and deal with issues on a smaller scale than would be necessary if the entire data center was migrated at once.

When the time comes to convert or migrate from purpose-built hardware servers to virtual machines, there are several options to consider. If the data center is small or your company can afford a small window of downtime, you can take servers out of production and then migrate to virtual machines. Although this procedure is more hands-on, it allows you to deal with issues out of band without affecting data integrity. For the larger data centers or data centers that cannot afford a maintenance window for migration (which is most likely the scenario), live migrations can be performed using one of many vendor-supplied tools that are readily available to automate the migration process, live, from bare metal server to virtual machine.

Once the decision has been made to take advantage of virtualization in your data center, the key to successfully accomplishing your objectives is research, and planning. The outcome and success of your virtualized environments will likely dictated by the level of preparation and detail you have provided in your project manifest.