Chapter 6. Application Deployment

This chapter includes the following topics:

• Baselining your infrastructure

• Allocating quality of service resources

• The pilot

• Verification process

• Predictive modeling

• Big bang vs. staged rollout

• Building a contingency plan

• Reporting

This chapter covers how to build up an accurate baseline using Cisco management tools and background data. It then discusses how to use this baseline to ascertain an application's impact on the environment at rollout and at application and infrastructure upgrades. Moving on, it discusses the allocation and deployment of quality of service (QoS) settings.

This chapter builds on what you learned in Chapter 3, "Detailing the Business Transaction," about how to optimize and profile the application. Specifically, this chapter covers the methodology and issues germane to rolling out that application. It discusses aspects such as staging a pilot program to check out work practices and verifying that a full rollout will not adversely affect your environment. The chapter then discusses steps that you should take if you incur problems, and how to report and quantify details of a successful rollout. The chapter then examines the importance of including a disaster and contingency plan as part of a deployment strategy.