VM and Legacy Playbook

VM and legacy platforms often run critical systems. Treat them as production platforms that need discipline, not as embarrassing systems to ignore until replacement.

Good fit

VMs and legacy compute may remain appropriate for:

• Vendor software with strict runtime assumptions.
• Stateful systems that are not safe to move yet.
• Windows services, IIS apps, or appliance-like workloads.
• Transitional modernization phases.
• Specialized networking or hardware dependencies.

Required defaults

Every VM-based system should define:

• Image or configuration management source.
• Patch and vulnerability process.
• Backup, restore, and DR expectations.
• Access model for SSH, RDP, and privileged operations.
• Logging, metrics, endpoint protection, and alerting.
• Deployment and rollback process.
• Ownership and escalation path.

Modernization sequence

Watchouts

• Long-lived hosts accumulate hidden state.
• Manual access bypasses audit and repeatability.
• Lift-and-shift migrations preserve many operational problems.
• Replatforming before observability can make incidents harder.

Practical improvements

Start with changes that reduce risk without forcing migration:

• Centralize logs and metrics.
• Remove shared admin credentials.
• Automate patch reporting.
• Document restore steps.
• Put deployment commands into pipelines.
• Create a service catalog entry and runbook.