The plan for modernizing apps is to move production apps off old servers to supported servers. You know that security and performance are at stake, but you might feel that legacy application modernization is difficult to do without affecting your app and business operations.
Perhaps you’ve thought of an in-place OS upgrade on production servers. This is a difficult task that doesn’t always work, especially if you’re not following a supported upgrade path. The production app might be unstable after the upgrade.
Re-installing production applications is also tough to do, especially if original install scripts and source code are missing, the original developers are long gone, and production systems have been patched and configured many times over the years. It might not be possible to reconfigure to the current, stable state of a production application.
A stateful re-install gets you moving
Every day, we successfully automate the stateful re-install of Windows Server and Linux apps. VirtaMove dynamically discovers the “as-is” state of production applications, then moves the application and all its data to a new, modern server without modifying the original server or impacting the production system. The application is securely sandboxed on a new server.
Automation can increase the number of applications that can be re-installed and cut-over into production on new servers.
A look at four stages involved in modernizing apps
The following figure illustrates four stages involved in modernizing apps the VirtaMove way.
In Stage 2, you copy the app to a migration container, keeping all the state and data intact. In Stage 3, you’ve re-installed your app on a new, modern server. You’ve reaped immediate benefits:
- You’ve closed known security exposures on unsupported servers.
- Better performance on new servers.
- You can reconfigure where apps run. Apps can be split and installed on separate servers or consolidated on a single server.
Modernizing apps by moving them to new servers extends their useful life and defers app redevelopment. Stage 3 buys you time for an optional Stage 4, where you can plan future functional or security improvements using a conventional change management process, using the tools and techniques available on a modern platform.
If you’d like to understand more about how we give business-critical production applications a second life, don’t hesitate to give us a call. We’re pleased to share what we know.