Posted by I have been asked recently about the “easiest” way to migrate workloads from OnPrem into the VMC. Since I believe “easy” is a matter of perception I thought I would list the 5 techniques I have utilized.
5 types of VM migrations for VMware Cloud on AWS
Migration with vMotion
Migration with vMotion allows moving a powered on virtual machine from one host and/or datastore to another. Migration with vMotion is also referred to as “hot migration” or “live migration”. Migration with vMotion is the best option for migrating small workloads without any downtime during migration.
Bulk migration
You can perform bulk migration using the VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX). Bulk migration uses host-based replication to move large scale VMs between on-premises data centers and cloud SDDCs with low downtime. To reduce downtime, the source VM remains powered-on during the replication and then is powered off and booted on the destination immediately after migration or during a scheduled window.
Cold migration
Cold migration is moving a powered-off virtual machine from one host and/or datastore to another. Cold migration is a good option when you can tolerate some virtual machine downtime during the migration process.
VMware Site Recovery Manager
SRM allows you to combine virtual machines into protection groups for consistency and place the PG into a Recovery Plan and perform a planned migration. This option allows your to perform one last incremental sync of your storage and suffer a minimal outage as the virtual machines are brought online in the SDDC.
Checklist:
https://docs.vmware.com/en/Site-Recovery-Manager/8.1/srm-install-config-8-1.pdf
Veeam
You can leverage Veeam by building an App server in the cloud. Proxy servers are built in onprem location. Replication is performed via Proxy servers to VMC vSAN as the job is defined on the App server. You can schedule one last incremental sync of storage before failing over to VMC causing minimal outage.
Checklist:
https://www.veeam.com/kb2414