Top 10 Server Consolidation issues – Part 7

So this is the final post in this series. I feel like I’ve missed out loads of information but it was my intention at the outset to present you with the major issues customers have told me about, and how I address them.

 

9. Change control or the lack of

I wrote in Part 3 about policy and changes to your processes before, during and after consolidation (not that consolidation ever truly finishes), change control is another one of those hot topics…as you if needed another one! Typically today you would be in the minority if you posses a change control system for your Windows estate that came close to the ones used for Mainframe and mid range systems. Most of the issues seem to be finding a way to handle the vast numbers of Windows systems and dealing with some of the inherent issues in the platform that cause change control systems problems, such as rollback and asset updating. Consolidating by reducing numbers can assist, but getting to a consolidated state is the problem we have to deal with currently. Probably most organisations will take what they currently use for change control and extend that, where it [change control] needs to be adapted primarily is to deal with the host system and its role in a virtualised solution and tracking individual applications and their dependencies in a co-hosted architecture. The latter is going to be the tricky one in most cases and will only work if you have good tools and process for asset & inventory control (discussed in Part1).

 

10. Re-writing an application isn’t possible (might not be now but may be in the future) or what applications can I consolidate?

I already touched on this in Part 2 of this series, and actually there isn’t much else to say – perhaps I should leave that to my developer colleagues before I get out of my depth. So I will just say, look for .NET applications as they tend to co-host extremely well, as do ones for a single vendor or even from your own developers (assuming they follow the same ‘standards’ as each other…your mileage may vary here).

I’ll close by saying to keep an eye on DSI as this has a major bearing from now on, concerning how applications are developed, managed and deployed.