NSX-v to NSX-T Migration: The Playbook Nobody Gives You
Having led this migration at enterprise scale, here’s the real playbook — including the gotchas that aren’t in VMware’s documentation.
Migration
Migrating VMs Between Datastores Without Downtime
Storage vMotion is the capability that makes VMware environments operationally flexible — you can move a VM’s virtual disks from one datastore to another while the VM continues running, without any user-visible downtime. Understanding how it works and what can go wrong makes it a tool you can use confidently. How Storage vMotion Works Storage … Read more
ESXi 5.5 to 6.5: The Upgrade Path Nobody Documents Completely
ESXi 5.5 reached end of general support in September 2018, creating real urgency to move environments that had been running the same version for three to four years. The upgrade path to 6.5 (the stable target at the time) had some gotchas that weren’t clearly documented in a single place. Here’s what the actual upgrade … Read more
Migrating from XenServer to VMware ESXi: The Practical Guide
At some point the XenServer environments I deployed for cost reasons hit a wall — either the organization’s needs grew beyond what XenServer’s ecosystem could support cleanly, or a strategic decision to standardize on VMware made the migration necessary. Moving workloads between hypervisors isn’t trivial, but with the right approach it’s manageable. The Core Challenge: … Read more
Planning Your Exchange 2013 to Office 365 Migration: Lessons from the Field
By late 2014, Office 365 had matured to the point where the question wasn’t “should we consider it” but “when do we move.” Organizations that had just completed Exchange 2013 deployments found themselves weighing a cloud migration sooner than expected. Here’s what a realistic transition looked like. The Hybrid Configuration: Necessary Complexity Microsoft’s recommended migration … Read more
Exchange 2013: Migrating from 2010 and What We Didn’t Expect
Exchange 2013 launched with a significantly revamped architecture, and when the organization I was supporting decided to move off Exchange 2010, I expected a relatively clean migration path. We’d done the 2007-to-2010 move a few years prior without too much drama. Exchange 2013 turned out to be a different beast. The Architecture Shift That Changes … Read more