Provisioning an Enterprise Datacenter in 1 Day – Part 1
Can you build a comprehensive and functional enterprise datacenter in a day? "Are you NUTS?" is the immediate reponse that came to my mind, but I'm coming around now.
I described briefly in my first post that we (CIS) develop and publish guidance and automation for customers that address real IT and business scenarios. We are constantly provisioning, reprovisioning and amending the underlying infrastructure these solutions are built on, and this is a very costly element of our operation. For most of our solutions we need three versions of the infrastructure - Development, Test and Production. Anything we can do to optimize the provisioning of these environments increases our agility and reduces the cost of providing the lab service.
The most comprehensive and complex infrastructure environment we use today is based on the Windows Server System Reference Architecture (WSSRA - was MSA). This is an environment of around 100 servers hosting the common workloads found in any Windows based enterprise datacenter.
With the arrival and evolution of our Virtual Server product, we've been able to virtualize the Development & Test implementations of the core components of the WSSRA environment on just 9 physical servers per implementation. This is a major milestone for the dramatic optimization of our build process, and has made it possible for us to build and stabilize the enterprise datacenter in 10 days (very cool but well short of our 1 day deployment goal). Some of the lessons we learned as we adopted Virtual Server can be found in the Solution for Consolidating and Migrating LOB Applications.
In my next post on this topic I'll share the approach we took to optimize this 10 day build process down to 4 days, as well as steps we are taking now to hit our ultimate goal of 1 day.
Is rapid deployment of Dev/Test environments a priority for you? What approach are you taking? What breakthroughs and/or blockers have you found?
jd
