The start of a pilot most often involves bringing IPv6 into the production network at some level or perhaps allows access from the production network into the lab environment. This is where more operational IT issues get tested and resolved, such as exposing day-to-day operations and support to IPv6-enabled endpoints, management applications, patching/updates, and help desk issues.
The most critical element of a pilot is more political than technical. It is imperative that a cross-functional virtual team of IT representatives be involved in the planning and rollout of the pilot. If the network team pushes IPv6 into pilot without the knowledge of the desktop, security, operations, applications/data center teams, or other IT groups, the pilot will fail.
A few actions that should be taken to successfully plan for and execute a successfully pilot include
■ Create a cross-IT virtual team (VT).
■ Set expectations and goals for the pilot with input from the VT and senior management.
■ Decide whether the pilot runs on the production network or whether selected users of the pilot are funneled into the lab.
■ Don’t be afraid to back out and try again with a new plan. It is better to experiment and find a workable solution now versus when moving to full production.
■ Don’t be afraid to take risks and try new things. It is a pilot, so if expectations are set properly with all involved, any outages or issues should have limited to no impact on production traffic.
■ Seek help. There are many resources on the Internet that can help you nail down configurations and tests and troubleshoot issues. Always reach out to your vendors for help, and if they won’t help, find other vendors.
■ Immediately file bugs with vendors so that they have as much time as they can get to resolve the bugs before you are ready for production. Support for Cisco can be accessed through the support site on Cisco.com, by calling TAC directly, or through the account team: http://www.cisco.com/cisco/web/support/index.html.
■ Learn. That is the purpose of a lab and a pilot. This should be a less stressful process than managing a production environment, so take some time, enjoy learning something new, and come out of the pilot with a well-documented plan for moving to production.
Summary
The success of most IT projects can be boiled down to how well they were planned, tested, and piloted. It is critical to the success of any IPv6 rollout to establish a lab and work through the network configurations, application deployment, operating system nuances, and management of the entire environment. The lessons learned from the lab directly translate into a more streamlined pilot. Every pilot should involve representatives from all areas of IT, with a clear set of goals and expectations.
