Updated P2V Flowchart
Last week, I had the honor of presenting at the
TechMentor Conference in Orlando. If you aren't familiar with TechMentor, you should be. Simply speaking, it is a track-driven series of training sessions brought to you by real-world experts on topics that everyone can use. Presenters this year included Greg Shields, Don Jones, Mark Minasi, Rhonda Layfield, and others.
In the virtualization track, we had a series of deep dives and technical sessions. The coverage very adequately represented Hyper-V and VMware, and it is tough to find good Hyper-V training from people that are actually using the technology.
I was pushing the VMware side heavily, but the natural conclusion is to make this seem like VMworld. TechMentor couldn't be farther from it. TechMentor is much more intimate and personal than VMworld. Sure, there are scores more attendees to VMworld. But, have you ever tried to stop and catch a quick conversation with someone at VMworld after a session? This isn't an issue at TechMentor, where the speakers are accessible.
This was my second year presenting, and one of the more popular sessions was my advanced conversion topic. I've maintained a running configuration of things I have learned over the years in performing physical-to-virtual (P2V) as well as virtual-to-virtual (V2V) conversions. The Visio diagram in Fig. 1 shows what can be a wonderful springboard for you to customize in your organization to collect lessons learned, avoid pitfalls with conversions and implement your own procedures, such as change controls and support contacts.
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| Figure 1. This P2V flowchart allows you to go about your conversions with a procedural approach; note that this is one page; download the whole flowchart here. (Click image to view larger version.) |
I also presented three other sessions: data center savings with virtualization, virtualization disaster recovery, and virtualization-specific backups. It was a great time in Orlando, in spite of the rain, but I hope to be back next year delivering more good virtualization sessions.
Posted by Rick Vanover on 03/16/2010 at 12:47 PM