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firesteelraintoday at 1:35 AM3 repliesview on HN

I don’t know how anyone can afford these migrations especially for production on prem workloads without building literally duplicate sets of hardware clusters then manually migrate workloads.


Replies

toast0today at 2:09 AM

I don't work at this level, but there's lots of things you can do.

a) you migrate in increments, so even if your migration needs to run old and new to compare, you don't need to do it for everything at once.

b) you probably have some slack, and you can make slack by packing tighter during migration.

c) you probably have some amount of regular hardware refresh. Retaining the old hardware a bit longer can get you more headroom for migration.

d) some servers can probably take an extended maintenance outage during conversion.

e) depending on everything, you might be able to get short term capacity from cloud or short term leases.

There's almost certainly some automation around migration. Some of it might even work.

Have a plan, make progress... even if you don't migrate everything by the date, you'll have done a lot and reduce the broadcom bill.

rwmjtoday at 2:08 AM

We usually reuse the VMware hardware and (most importantly) file storage. Some additional hardware is required temporarily so you can build out initial Openshift nodes. The VMware nodes are decommissioned and converted to OSV nodes as the conversion goes along. With some kinds of file storage (cough NetApp) the conversion is zero copy, the VM literally stays where it is. With others we will copy to new NFS storage areas which will be provisioned on the same physical hardware.

burntetoday at 1:38 AM

Hire me, I'll be more than happy to show you! :D I'm an expert at it!

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