Migrating Your Data Estate from an Incumbent Hypervisor to Nutanix AHV: Key Considerations with Veeam Data Platform

Billy Cashwell

3 months ago

Introduction

Migrating from an incumbent hypervisor to Nutanix AHV offers numerous advantages, including simplified management, enhanced security, and improved total cost of ownership (TCO). To ensure a seamless transition and robust data protection, integrating Veeam Data Platform into your migration strategy is essential. This blog outlines the critical considerations and best practices for migrating your entire data estate to Nutanix AHV with the support of Veeam Data Platform.

Understanding Nutanix AHV and Veeam Data Platform

Nutanix AHV

Nutanix AHV is a native hypervisor integrated with the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS. It is designed to simplify virtualization by eliminating the need for additional virtualization management tools that are typically required with other hypervisors. Key benefits of AHV include:

Simplified Management: Unified management interface for compute, storage, and networking.
Enhanced Security: Built-in security features such as micro-segmentation and automated patching.
Operational Efficiency: Nutanix AHV simplifies your infrastructure by removing the need for complex, third-party hypervisor licensing and management tools, leading to a more streamlined virtual environment.

Veeam Data Platform

Veeam Data Platform provides comprehensive data protection, backup, and disaster recovery solutions. Key benefits include:

Secure backups: Ensures data integrity and availability with immutability and advanced capabilities such as policy-based backup job.
Fast recovery: Minimizes downtime with instant recovery or granular restore options.
Scalability: Supports scalable and flexible backup architecture.
Integration with Nutanix AHV: Seamless integration with Nutanix AHV and Nutanix Prism Central, for optimized data protection.

Pre-Migration Assessment

1. Inventory of Existing Infrastructure

Upfront planning is essential to any infrastructure migration. It is important to conduct a thorough inventory of your current infrastructure, including:

Current State Analysis: The current environment should be analyzed, with a special focus on any current issues. It is also important to examine ecosystem dependencies between the old and new hypervisor platforms, and identify them up front.
Capacity Planning: Assess current CPU, memory, storage and network capacity, performance, and configurations.

Applications: Identify critical applications, their dependencies, performance characteristics, and their line of business owners. Additionally, verification should be performed to ensure that applications are supported on the new platform.

2. Compatibility Check

Ensure that your hardware and software are compatible with Nutanix AHV and Veeam Data Platform. Key considerations include:

Hardware compatibility: If you are not planning on using first-party Nutanix appliances, verify that your servers, storage devices, and network components are on the Nutanix Hardware Compatibility List (HCL).
Software compatibility: Check that your operating systems, applications, and management tools are supported by AHV and Veeam.

3. Performance Baseline

Establish a performance baseline for your existing environment. This will help you to:

Identify bottlenecks: Determine current performance issues that need to be addressed. Issues can range from metrics pulled within applications, virtualized OSes, at the host level, or even at the infrastructure level. Some of the more common measurements taken typically involve disk latency, network throughput, and overall application response times.
Set expectations: Provide a benchmark to key stakeholders and objectively compare pre- and post-migration performance. It is important that any current operational and performance issues are identified before the migration.

Migration Strategy

1. Choosing the Right Migration Method

There are multiple ways to migrate from an incumbent hypervisor to AHV. Two of the most popular methods are:

Nutanix Move: Use Nutanix’s native tool to migrate to AHV. You can learn more about how it operates here.
Restore from Veeam Backup & Replication: Simply execute a restore operation from the previous hypervisor to AHV using Veeam Backup & Replication.

2. Successful Data Backup

Ensure robust data protection measures are in place before and during migration:

Backup data: Implement a comprehensive backup plan with Veeam Data Platform to safeguard your data.
Verify backups: Ensure backups are in working order before proceeding with any migration or application changes. In the event of any issue, VMs can quickly be restored with Veeam.

3. Pilot Testing

Conduct a pilot migration to validate your strategy and identify potential issues:

Test environment: Create a test environment that mirrors your production setup.
Pilot group: Select a small, representative sample of workloads for the pilot phase. As part of this, ensure that application owners are involved as part of the testing. The pilot group can be used to validate general, non-workload specific settings such as performance testing, network configurations, security settings, data protection compatibility, and much more.

Execution and Monitoring

1. Migration Execution

Follow a structured approach to execute the migration:

Start with less critical workloads: When possible, start migrations with Dev/Test workloads to reduce the overall risk and business impact of the migration.
Phased approach: Migrate workloads in phases to minimize risk and downtime. Ensure that application dependencies are mapped as part of this, and understand what connectivity might be required by multi-VM applications spanning across hypervisors. Maintenance windows should be planned and clearly communicated to the business in order to minimize unplanned disruptions. This is a much more manageable approach than migrating everything at once.
Allow a burn in period between phases: Before beginning a new phase of migrations, allow the previous set to run in the new environment to ensure there are no issues.

2. Post-Migration Validation

Validate the success of the migration with thorough testing:

Functional testing: Ensure applications and services are functioning correctly. Testing should not be limited to solely the applications – tasks such as reviewing event logs for applications and the operating system should be performed to ensure that no underlying issues exist.
Performance testing: Compare post-migration performance with your baseline and review the results with key decision-makers. If variances do exist, having clear guidelines as to what is or is not acceptable is key
Plan for failure: Should a migration not pass a functional or performance test, it is critical to have a contingency plan. In some cases, organizations may decide to fail back to the original platform until the issue can be remedied. In some cases, decreased performance may be acceptable under certain conditions, such as if overall metrics are still in line with business requirements. Understanding what these thresholds are, and just as importantly, understanding how to address shortcomings ahead of time, can significantly reduce long-term degradation and damages to the organization.

Best Practices for Nutanix AHV and Veeam Data Platform Migration

1. Training and Knowledge Transfer

Invest in training for your IT staff to ensure they are proficient in managing AHV and Veeam Data Platform:

Nutanix and Veeam training programs: Enroll in Nutanix and Veeam certification courses and training sessions.
Knowledge sharing: Encourage knowledge transfer within your team through documentation and workshops.

2. Optimization and Tuning

Optimize your AHV and Veeam environment for peak performance:

Resource allocation: Ensure optimal allocation of CPU, memory, and storage resources. For more on AHV performance, please see Nutanix AHV Best Practices.
Network optimization: Fine-tune network settings for low latency and high throughput. These settings can vary greatly from requiring specific changes within applications, to alterations within the guest OS, to possibly fine-tuning network settings within AHV. Additional areas that can impact network performance can include the hardware drivers for the components with the server, network switches that the servers connect to, as well as the possibility of firewalls in between. With the switch to a new hypervisor, and possibly to new hardware, there can be a significant number of variables that change between the systems. Network optimization can often be a long-term commitment and can become a daunting task, so it is key to understand what the optimal performance is for your organization before striving to get the “best” performance possible.

3. Regular Updates and Patching

Stay current with the latest updates and patches:

Automated patching: Leverage Nutanix and Veeam’s automated patching capabilities to maintain security and stability. As part of the patching, ensure that downtime is planned for when services may be unavailable. In the case of Veeam, ensure you plan for disruptions of backups which may be taking place during the planned window. After patching is complete, assess whether any impacted backup jobs can be performed in order to minimize impacts to your Recovery Time Objective.
Release notes: Review release notes to understand the impact of updates and create a rollout plan. Security-related issues are commonly seen as requiring quick remediation, whereas bugfixes or new features commonly may have a longer lead time before applying. Work with your security and operations teams to develop an agreed-upon strategy to implement new patches based on the needs of and risks to the business.

Migrating your data estate to Nutanix AHV, with the robust data protection of Veeam Data Platform, can significantly enhance your IT infrastructure’s efficiency, security, and cost-effectiveness. By following the considerations and best practices outlined in this blog, you can work towards ensuring a smooth and successful transition. Proper planning, thorough testing, and continuous optimization are key to realizing the full benefits of Nutanix AHV and Veeam Data Platform.

Conclusion

For more information on Nutanix AHV and Veeam Data Platform migration, or to schedule a consultation, please contact our team of experts. We are here to help you every step of the way in your journey to a more efficient and secure data center.