Most organizations have long struggled with the need for scalable and highly available environments to both develop and test applications. In this age of agile software development, customers have many Dev/Test environments for quality assurance and time-to-market reasons. Additionally, packaged applications tend to have increasingly shorter lifespans and are subject to more frequent updates.
While developers feel the pain of waiting for infrastructure and not having an exact replica of production to test on, the IT admins struggle to provide capacity on demand and to recreate complex multi-tier application environments for Unit Test, Integration Test, Performance Test, Staging, UAT etc. These environments not only have to replicate the production environments for optimal test effectiveness, but they also have to provide frictionless portability of workloads and support newer Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) processes across hybrid test and production environments in order to optimize the economic benefits. A hybrid cloud approach can best address these issues by enabling more agile development methodologies.
VMware vCloud Air solves this challenge with a seamless, highly available and secure platform that bridges the divide between test and production environments. By leveraging the same vSphere platform and utilizing the same on-premises tools and processes, vCloud Air delivers on-demand test environments that are exactly the same as production environments. vCloud Air delivers more accurate and efficient testing, accelerated time to production and more reliable instant infrastructure services that allow any application you design, build, test and run in the cloud to be completely interoperable with your data center.
In Part 1 of this blog series, we will look at getting started with vCloud Air by using Virtual Private Cloud OnDemand for upgrading Windows Server 2003. Microsoft just announced EoL for Server 2003 as of July 12, 2015 and right now many of you are scrambling for resources to upgrade Windows Server 2003 virtual machines. Richard Munro has discussed this situation in detail in this blog.
So how do you get started? Just follow these simple steps:
- Full-Clone the virtual machine running on Windows Server 2003
- Migrate the cloned VM using vCloud Connector
- Upgrade the VM in vCloud Air to Server 2008 or 2012
- Test to make sure your apps working fine
- Migrate back on-prem using vCloud Connector
Watch this end-to-end demo of the upgrade process:
Sign up for vCloud Air Virtual Private Cloud OnDemand here to simplify and accelerate upgrade processes.
from vmwarenews.de , Original Post Here
