Pilot Scope

What makes developing a pilot plan challenging is that it must represent a scaled-down production deployment that validates the technical solution and operational processes without requiring the entire project scope to be completed. To accomplish this, the pilot scope should limit the locations and virtualization candidates to the minimum set that is required to validate the virtualization solution. All aspects of the design should be implemented (management, backup, administration, and so on), but the implementation does not have to include the full scale of the design. For example, to validate the physical to virtual machine migration process, you only need to perform a representative set of migrations—you do not need to migrate every server during the pilot phase.

Selecting Pilot Locations

During consolidation planning, physical location is used to create virtualization candidate groups that must be migrated to Hyper-V servers in the same location. A subset of these physical locations can also be used as targets during the pilot. By doing this, you can select the locations based on priority, complexity, size, proximity, or supportability. If the virtualization project involves central data center and remote office locations, the pilot scope should include one data center location and one remote location at a minimum.