Workload migration involves moving applications, data, and IT between physical servers, virtual machines (VMs), or different on-premises infrastructure environments. For the purposes of this blog, this context is distinct from cloud migration, which moves workloads to public or private cloud platforms.
For businesses with edge environments that also want to modernize their infrastructure, the process of workload migration means moving from legacy physical servers to virtualized environments.
Why is Workload Migration Important?
Businesses across all industries rely on their applications to drive change and digital transformation efforts. Whether it’s modernizing your infrastructure, or trying something new, it’s a technical, organizational, and operational undertaking.
Workload portability and migration are at the heart of the IT modernization process. Workload migration enables your business to transform, without being locked-in to the same-old providers or vendors, who might change performance, prices, or policies at any time.
Workload Migration: A Necessary Part of IT Infrastructure Modernization
Yes, migrating workloads is an inevitable part of IT infrastructure modernization, but it comes with real risks. When you’re moving data, there could be downtime that impacts business operations, compatibility issues with legacy applications, data loss during transfer, skills gaps on your IT team, and cost overruns that derail projects.
These risks multiply in edge environments, where on-site access is more logistically difficult, and downtime directly impacts revenue. For example, a failed migration at a remote retail site or manufacturing facility means lost sales and expensive emergency site visits.
So, how can you manage workload migration risks and execute successful transitions in an edge environment? Let’s explore the top struggles and how to overcome them.
Workload Migration Challenges and Fixes
1. Minimizing Downtime
Every minute of downtime costs your business. At edge locations, downtime has an immediate impact, so plan any workload migration during low-traffic windows when business impact is lowest. For example, for retail locations, this might be overnight or during known slow periods. For manufacturing sites, schedule during maintenance windows.
Use live migration tools where possible. Modern hypervisors support live migration that moves running VMs between hosts with minimal interruption. Applications stay available during the transition and users don’t experience downtime.
2. Compatibility Issues
Not all workloads play nice with new or changing IT infrastructure. Every IT team knows that legacy applications built for specific hardware configurations can sometimes break when moved to new, virtualized environments.
To overcome this, conduct thorough assessments before migration and document dependencies, hardware requirements, and performance baselines. And use trusted compatibility testing tools to identify issues early.
Being prepared and foreseeing compatibility issues in advance reduces the chances of issues in the future. Importantly, you can seek the support of a trusted vendor with experience managing the migration process of your specific software or hardware. This isn’t about outsourcing your IT team – but supporting them to manage the process.
3. Enabling High Availability
High availability (HA) architectures keep applications running even if individual components fail during transition. Implementing features such as a two-node cluster with witness configurations keeps VMs available when migrating between nodes. And HA best practices, such as automatic failover, maintain service if migration encounters problems. Without HA, your IT team is more likely to have no backup plan if things go wrong, leaving them in the dark.
If you’re managing edge locations without this infrastructure, consider deploying HA architecture before migrating critical workloads. Why? This upfront (and low-cost) investment protects against migration risk and provides ongoing operational benefits, beyond just migrating workloads. Learn more about the importance of high availability servers.
4. Data Loss
Data loss during workload migration can occur for multiple reasons. Whether it’s system errors, network interruptions, human configuration mistakes, or power failures during data transfer.
Implement a robust backup strategy and verify backups work by running test restores, because untested backups aren’t really backups at all. Use migration tools with built-in integrity checks and maintain parallel systems during cutover periods so you have a fallback if migration reveals unexpected problems.
For edge locations, redundancy is an important feature, and during migration is particularly important because on-site intervention is difficult, and a failed migration at a remote site without proper redundancy can mean extended downtime and costly site visits. Building redundancy into your migration infrastructure means single points of failure don’t derail the entire process. Plan migrations with multiple fallback options at each step so you’re never in a position where one failure stops everything.
5. Skills Gaps
Your team knows your organization’s existing infrastructure inside and out, understanding every quirk, every workaround, and every troubleshooting step.
But modernized IT infrastructure represents a learning curve that slows everything down, and the gap in understanding creates risk during migration.
Invest in training before you need it by starting with pilot projects that give your team hands-on experience in low-stakes environments where mistakes don’t impact production. Choose infrastructure that champions itself as easy to deploy and manage, without sacrificing performance, because complexity will only demoralize your team and increase project timelines. Importantly, choosing the right vendors and providers means that, when you’re stuck at 2 AM troubleshooting issues at a remote site, you’ll get 24/7 support that makes all the difference between quick resolution and extended downtime.
6. Cost Overruns
For edge deployments with multiple sites, pricing and licensing complexity multiplies quickly. A pricing model that seems reasonable for one location becomes expensive when applied across dozens of sites. Choose licensing that’s transparent and predictable across your entire distributed IT infrastructure so you can plan capacity and growth without budget surprises.
Workload Migration Stays Manageable, With the Right Support
Most failed workload migrations trace back to skipped steps rather than technical limitations, so the planning sometimes matters more than the specific tools you use. Just like any part of the process of making changes to your IT infrastructure.
Start migrating workloads with one site or one non-critical application, then validate your process and learn from what goes wrong before scaling to your entire infrastructure. The goal isn’t a perfect first migration but a repeatable process that gets better each time you execute it, building your team’s confidence and competence as you progress through increasingly critical workloads.
Ultimately, it’s also the vendor you choose that impacts the success of workload migration. If you have the correct tools to easily manage migrating workloads, the whole process is significantly simpler overall!
