Closure Review
Project Summary:
No. | Description | Objective Met? |
O1 | To provide a resilient, up-to-date and supportable Windows hosting environment | Y |
O2 | To consolidate the existing Windows hosting environments | Y |
| O3 | To ensure ample capacity on the service for the next 3 to 5 years, with the ability to extend as far as possible | Y |
| O4 | Eliminate risk of hardware failure and software vulnerability on legacy servers and OS versions | Y |
In the project brief, the following deliverables were identified:
No. | Description | Delivered? |
D1 | A control panelled Windows web-hosting environment, with up-to-date server software | Y |
D2 | The virtualisation of the Windows hosting infrastructure | Y |
| D3 | The upgrade of the associated SQL Server service | Y |
D4 | The deployment and configuration of an interface hosting management solution [e.g.control panel software] | Y |
| D5 | An audit and migration (as necessary) of 200-300+ current hosts and data, plus separate application databases | Partial |
| D6 | An audit and migration of applications and databases (as necessary) hosted on ucs-sequel, its hosted web server webdb.ucs, and dev server webdbdev.ucs | Partial |
| D7 | The possible audit and migration of c.40 MVM-owned hosts and data, plus separate application databases. | Partial |
| D8 | The analysis of best solution that will allow for exponential growth in number of hosted sites and databases | Y |
| D9 | The implementation of replication backup software | Y |
Deliverables 5, 6 and 7 are listed as partial because, although the relevant audits have been completed, not all of the migrations have been executed at this time. Most of the databases and the more complex sites have been migrated, but it has proven more difficult than anticipated to engage with some site owners in order to plan the necessary migrations. This has therefore delayed the final decommissioning of the old servers, so this final piece of work (decommissioning) has been transferred to the scope of INF105 (Decommission Obsolete Infrastructure). The remaining site migrations are being carried out by Service Management with the site owners. Support for any problematic migrations can be provided by Development Technology under INF105, if necessary.
Analysis of Resource Usage:
Staff Usage Estimate: 161 days
Staff Usage Actual: 138 days
Staff Usage Variance: -14%
Other Resource Estimate: 0 days
Other Resource Actual: 0 days
Other Resource Variance: 0%
Explanation for variance:
Reduction in effort
With the completion of the build stage, and an understanding of the capabilities of the Plesk software, the project team was better placed to estimate the remaining work. The project budget was consequently re-estimated, and a total of 20 days was removed from the original project budget and returned to the COM programme. The figure of 20 days was largely the difference between best case and worst case figures for the stages completed at that point, as well as some time for outstanding work that was not considered to still be required.
The final figure is a few days less than the last estimate, and this is attributable to the decommissioning of the old servers being moved to INF105.
Change of scope
As noted above, the final task of decommissioning the old hosting service has been transferred to the scope of INF105 because it has not been possible to plan an end date for the last of the migrations.
Key Learning Points:
Two particular issues caused problems for this project, and while they were both eventually resolved, they did cause delays to the project. These were as follows:
Issues with Plesk and Cosign
There are about ten sites on the hosting service that use Cosign, and migrating these in TEST highlighted the incompatibility between the two applications. Some time was spent in trying to resolve these difficulties, and the different suppliers were contacted, as well as help being sought from other groups. But this was all to no avail, and the decision was made to migrate the 'Cosign' sites to another service that did not use Plesk. The consequence for COM014 was that the TEST server had to be rebuilt to remove components that had been used to get Cosign working, thus using several extra days effort within the Build stage, and causing a delay to the sign-off. This may have been anticipated by checking that Plesk met our business requirements before purchasing it, and making appropriate plans beforehand to work around this issue at an earlier stage of the project.
Licensing problems
This was another compatibility issue with Plesk - this time with ColdFusion. The former will work with CF10 but not CF11, and any new installation of ColdFusion will default to the latter version. We acquired a CF11 license through a reseller, with the understanding that it could be retrograded to work with CF10. But this proved to be difficult to achieve, with neither the reseller nor the contact given at Adobe was able to help resolve the problem. In the end, another reseller was contacted and they were able to provide more detail on how to do this, and another team in Adobe supplied the necessary license keys. This all added a delay of a few weeks to getting the Live service ready for use, and was frustrating for the project team as it was a task that might be considered to be relatively straightforward. It is not thought that this could have been anticipated.
Outstanding issues:
The migrations from the old service are ongoing, managed by Service Management, and any support (if required) can be provided by Development Technology. And the final 'switching off' of the old service has been moved to INF105.
Update 11/08/15
This completion report was originally submitted to WIS on 31/07, but it was not accepted because there was no formal record of a TAD review (by Tech Man) and of handover between Dev Tech and Tech Management. These have now been addressed and there is a meeting arranged for August at which the latter's questions about the TAD can be addressed. This approach has the approval of management in Production Management.