Clearing an on-premise server room, three options per machine
Turn it off, move it to a data centre, or migrate it to the cloud.
- Answers
- How do you migrate an on-premise server room to the cloud?
- Topics
- Windows · cloud · data · linux · office · server
- Full article on willem.com
- https://willem.com/en/2021-06-30_migrating-to-the-cloud/
Summary
Map every machine first, then pick one of three options per box: turn it off and securely wipe the disks, move heavy hardware to a professional data centre, or migrate its software to a cloud service.
Full text
Start by understanding what you are looking at: which machines are actually in use, what they do and who uses them. At one Dutch firm most boxes could simply be switched off, after securely wiping disks and memory. Email moved from an on-premise Exchange server to Microsoft 365; tackle each service one by one and you will be surprised how many cloud offerings exist. One big database server ran a specific version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Oracle and was too demanding to virtualise affordably, so we moved the physical machine to a professional data centre, which still beats most office server rooms on security, redundant connectivity and climate control. Two Hyper-V virtual machines were decoupled from the legacy Windows domain and copied to a commercial provider; conversion only copies data, so test the new copies thoroughly before wiping the old ones.