New Whitepaper

At VirtaMove we spend much of our days advising our customers on how to remediate their risk of running Windows Server 2003 servers after it reaches the end of extended support this summer. To help, we have compiled some of our best thinking into a whitepaper to help you plan your migration project. The whitepaper was just released and is available here.

Excerpt

This whitepaper discusses the essentials of Up-Level migration of WS2003 applications. Microsoft WS2003 reaches the end of support on July 14, 2015. If you’re still running WS2003 — and reports indicate an estimated 57% of organizations are — it’s likely that a number of factors, from legacy applications, security challenges or business disruption concerns, are preventing you from making the move. Microsoft is reporting the average WS2003 migration project consumes six to eight months, while Gartner research says an average migration takes between nine and 15 months. If you have WS2003 servers, it’s critical to understand precisely how end of support will affect your organization, as well as which migration scenarios and timeline make the most sense. Finally, understanding which tools are available and most appropriate will ease the process of moving to newer operating systems or the cloud.

The good news is: 1) It is not too late, and 2) migrating to newer server operating systems and clouds has never been easier. Old-fashioned approaches to upgrading, such as re-installing and upgrading machines or rebuilding them, are no longer necessary. Earlier generations of migration tools that necessitated migration of the whole machine have given way to a new approach known as “Up-level” migration, which separates applications from the underlying operating system. Up-level migration allows for packaging of nearly all types of Windows Server applications for migration from older operating systems (OS) to newer versions, as well as into portable containers that can be provisioned from datacenters, independent of any cloud. As part of the emerging technology trend of application containerization, the benefits of Up-level migration are significant. Specifically, Up-level migration enables:

  • Huge time savings – an estimated 1-2 weeks savings per application moved. This compares to do-it-yourself manual reinstall, reconfigured and migrated data, with the onerous tasks of identification, extraction and movement of some applications in minutes
  • Source machines are left untouched and unchanged. Migrated applications look like newly installed ones on a clean OS. Server drift is eliminated.
  • Easy portability to servers, data centers or any cloud. Being able to move to different types of cloud infrastructure avoids vendor lock-in for greater enterprise control over costs, enhanced security and improvements in availability.

In this whitepaper, you will learn the essentials of Up-Level migration of WS2003 applications, including:

  • How WS2003 end of support on July 14, 2015, can affect your enterprise; how to determine your risks and what, when and why to move your workloads and applications off aging server operating systems;
  • How to implement a migration plan, with step-by-step examples for moving some or all of your workloads/applications from server to server — or to public, private or hybrid clouds;
  • How Up Level migration using container-based migration software can be used to encapsulate even complex server applications into virtual application appliances (VAAs) to quickly deploy WS2003 applications to any machine or cloud.

You can download the whitepaper here. If you have questions about the paper or would like help planning your migration project, contact us.