A cloud engineer walked into a bar and – no joke – ended up having to migrate a datacenter
The budget was minimal, FedEx was the bottleneck, and DNS was of course the source of trouble
Dave Bradley, a senior cloud engineer at Vizient, visited a bar late one night following an off-site company meeting. While leaving the establishment, Bradley spotted his boss at another nearby bar, discussing the possibility of shutting down the Chicago datacenter and migrating all workloads to Dallas within two weeks. Excited by the challenge, Bradley teamed up with a networking colleague to brainstorm a plan.
Management initially set a daunting six-to-seven-month deadline, but eventually narrowed the target down to a more achievable six-to-seven month period.
The migration process was fraught with challenges, including different IP addressing schemes and insufficient hardware to support all workloads during the transfer. To overcome these issues, Bradley and his team consolidated workloads onto a subset of servers and storage arrays. They utilized Vizient's existing licenses for VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) to facilitate IP address remapping during the migration.
Bradley's team carried out a three-night migration push, each night focused on a different part of the company's infrastructure.
The project faced several setbacks, such as DNS glitches and a transportation bottleneck caused by Federal Express refusing to provide insurance for the shipment of hardware. However, Bradley and his team learned from these setbacks and executed a flawless final migration, resulting in only about two hours of downtime. Bradley credits the success of the project to the balanced approach adopted by the team, combining the detail-oriented nature of some members with the problem-solving skills of others.
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