Performing a Server Migration

With the cloud being a predominantly virtualized environment, you should understand how to take your existing servers and applications running directly on their own hardware and migrate them to the virtualized world of hypervisors and VMs. In this section, you will learn about this process. We will start by showing you how to gather background information. Then you will learn about creating the virtual images and address the issues of storage and how you will migrate the data for the application.

Careful and detailed planning is critical to a successful migration of operating systems off a physical server and onto a hypervisor as a virtual server. To establish what will be required as a virtual server, you must collect information such as CPU, memory, storage, and I/O needs from the existing server. You can do so by establishing a baseline of the server to be migrated. The monitoring and data collection process will vary as to what types of applications the...