Tuesday, December 1, 2015

Hyper-V Series - Introduction

I've had the pleasure (I can finally say that now) of migrating a decent sized environment from VMware ESXi/vCenter to Hyper-V/SCVMM over the past few months.  It is still in progress but the bulk of the "hard work" is done at this point and the light at the end of the tunnel is getting brighter.  The migration was much more than just switching hypervisors and management platforms.  It has consisted of redesigning our entire multi-tenant hosting platform while switching out almost every backend piece of supporting infrastructure and doing it in a "swing migration" style to keep costs relatively low.

It has been quite a ride to say the least... and by ride I mean something along the lines of what I imagine riding a turbocharged unicycle off-road, down the side of an erupting volcano while trying not to crash or get burned would be like.  Not sure where exactly that came from as I have never been on a unicycle nor have I been chased by lava, but hopefully you get the idea.  It wasn't easy, full of obstacles, and time was not exactly on my side.  I ran into numerous roadblocks along the way but overall the journey has been totally worth it (so far).  I want to share my experience and also try to help others who may be encountering the same issues I had, or better yet, prevent them from going through the pain by avoid mistakes.  Someone new to Hyper-V may not have nearly the trouble I had switching my mindset from the VMware world to the Microsoft world.  But if you are like me and have lived in VMware for the past 7 years or so, "logical networks" and "logical switches" may not seem so logical at first.

My role and overall experience with virtualization and its supporting technologies put me in the unique position of allowing me to handle this project in its entirety from initial design through post production.  It is still a work in progress and admittedly the initial design has changed a few times at this point, but ultimately the goal has remained constant:  design/build/implement a hosting platform that is easy to consume for tenants, easy to support/grow for our service team, easy to pitch as a vision for our account managers, easy to sell for our sales team, and of course, decrease costs and complexity while increasing profitability, reliability, scalability, supportability, and expanding the feature set.  Simple, right?

I'm still putting together the bullet points for this and trying to keep it from being a long ramble or collection of random thoughts that no one really cares about.  Personally, I would have been lost without the help of bloggers, youtubers and forum posters.  TechNet alone only gives part of the big picture.  Training and certification courses are another small piece.  Previous experience actually made some of it more confusing than it needed to be.  I want to give back to the community.  I hope to be able to contribute some bits of experience to help bring it all together for others.  If nothing else, it will help me reinforce the concepts for myself!

If there is anything you would like to specifically discuss, always feel free to leave a comment or find me on LinkedIn or Twitter (@johnyarbi) and send me a message.  I may not have the answer, but I try to reply to everything and may be able to point you in the right direction.  Looking forward to hearing from you!

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