Accelerate VMware-based workload modernization with AWS Partner solutions

By Shilpa Andam, Partner Solutions Architect – Consulting
By Jessica Ho, Manager, Partner Solutions Architect

Migrating VMware-based workloads from on-premises to the cloud can be complex and time-consuming. This pain point is especially acute for enterprises that have heavily invested in VMware infrastructure and are looking to leverage the benefits of cloud computing. AWS has a long track record of supporting customers on their migration and modernization of VMware workloads to AWS. This is also where Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) come into play, offering a range of specialized solutions to simplify and automate the migration journey.

AWS has collaborated with our partner community to provide guidance, incentives, and resources under the Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) for VMware workloads. We have listened to feedback from our customers, and AWS is providing solutions to help you effectively address the complexity of migrations.

This blog explores how ISV solutions help organizations in the migration phases of their journey: discovery and assessment, migration, and operations of VMware workloads to AWS. We’ll examine specific use cases and scenarios where these ISV solutions automate tasks with their capabilities and offerings.

Partner Solution Landscape

To accelerate this journey, we are launching a new AWS-funded ISV license offer under the MAP program. This offer is available to our customers and qualified consulting partners supporting VMware-based workload migration for lower TCO. We will explore the solutions offered by our launch partners in this blog, and we are continuously working with additional ISV partners through the validation process.

These ISV partners have demonstrated a track record of success with customers by attaining AWS Migration and Modernization Competency for their software offerings. The competency program is designed to identify, validate, and promote AWS Partners with demonstrated AWS technical expertise and proven customer success. Their solutions went through technical validation with our migration subject-matter experts to understand their capabilities and security postures.

Many of their solutions, in Figure 1, integrate with AWS Migration Hub to provide a single pane of glass for the end-to-end migration process. As a customer, you can benefit from the ease of discovery, procurement, and management of these solutions through AWS Marketplace.

Figure 1: ISV mapping to the 3 phases of migration under MAP

Partner solutions offer customers advantages such as an expedited migration timeline, global coverage, cost savings, automation and risk management, and continuous performance monitoring. These solutions streamline discovery, planning, and migration processes, ensuring seamless support across global locations. They also help reduce risks like data loss and security breaches, ensuring a smooth transition. Real-time application performance monitoring and analytics are also provided to assess the impact of migration on application performance.

Assessing Readiness and Planning for Migration

The first steps in the application migration journey are discovery and assessment, during which these partner solutions catalogue applications and their dependencies. Partner assessment solutions help identify potential dependencies and problems that may affect the effectiveness of a migration. They provide a holistic view and analysis of target environment compatibility, performance baselines, resource utilization, and security requirements that enable informed migration decision-making.

CAST Highlight‘s application intelligence platform offers comprehensive assessment capabilities, including source code analysis, architecture analysis, and cloud readiness assessment. Unlike infrastructure-focused solutions, CAST examines application source code for insights into technical debt, complexity, and cloud compatibility. This is particularly valuable for evaluating proprietary applications that may not be well-supported on standard EC2 instances.

Cloudamize’s assessment solution analyzes your existing applications and infrastructure. Identifying potential compatibility issues, security risks, and performance bottlenecks. It provides detailed reports and recommendations to help you plan and execute a successful migration.

CloudHedge’s assessment module leverages AI and machine learning to analyze your applications and infrastructure. It identifies potential issues such as security vulnerabilities, compliance gaps, and performance bottlenecks. Providing detailed insights into their cloud readiness.

Device42 provides comprehensive discovery and application mapping capabilities to support migration assessment and planning. Leveraging automated configuration management data (CMDB) solutions. Device42 can continuously map an organization’s IT ecosystem, including data center, legacy, and cloud resources. By autopopulating affinity groups and offering detailed migration recommendations, Device42 helps streamline complex cloud transition projects.

Matilda Discover’s discovery and assessment capabilities are designed to provide a comprehensive understanding of your application portfolio. It automatically discovers and maps dependencies, configurations, and resource utilization, enabling you to make informed decisions about which applications to migrate and how to optimize them for the cloud.

Concierto lays the foundation for successful migration through its automated assessment. It enables a thorough evaluation of the current IT & Application landscape providing detailed insights for migration strategies (6R), optimized licensing considerations, total cost, target state recommendations, modernization options and migration execution plan; thereby enabling the organization for automated migrations.

Once the assessment phase is complete, these ISV solutions provide migration planning and execution capabilities. Allowing you to create detailed migration plans, prioritize workloads, and automate the migration process. Many of these solutions also offer post-migration monitoring and optimization features to ensure your applications run smoothly in the cloud and maintain optimal performance and cost efficiency.

By leveraging the assessment and planning capabilities of these ISV solutions, organizations can gain valuable insights into their application portfolio, identify potential risks and challenges, and develop a well-informed migration strategy tailored to their specific needs.

Automating Cloud Migration and Modernization

Migration solutions play a role in seamlessly transitioning applications and workloads from on-premises or other cloud environments to AWS Cloud. These solutions automate the discovery and assessment of existing resources, providing insights into dependencies, compatibility, and right-sizing recommendations. They also streamline the migration process, minimizing downtime and ensuring data integrity.

The below migration solutions streamline the process by automating various tasks, reducing manual effort, and minimizing the risk of errors and downtime. They provide a structured approach to migrating applications and workloads, ensuring a smooth transition to the cloud environment.

CloudHedge’s end-to-end platform automates the discovery, assessment, transformation, and management of applications migrating to AWS. Leveraging AI, it refactors and containerizes applications, reducing time and cost while enhancing performance, security, and compliance.

Matilda Migrate is a SaaS solution focused on discovery, migration, and optimization of applications to AWS. It offers up to 85% automated discovery, optional agents for container discovery, and over 40 third-party integrations, enabling up to 10x faster cloud migrations at half the cost.

RiverMeadow provides both agent and agentless migrations, interacting with source virtual machines and vCenter directly. It offers right-sizing recommendations based on 30-day performance data stored in vCenter and can perform Windows and Linux modernization in-flight.

Concierto Migrate is a zero-code, hyper-automated SaaS platform which enables enterprises and managed service providers (MSPs). It allows you to assess, plan, and execute bulk migrations from on-premises or any cloud to AWS. In addition, it will manage and optimize the cloud and technology operations.

Delivering Cloud Operations with Ease of Management

Organizations often turn to specialized cloud operations (CloudOps) solutions to maintain optimal performance, security, and cost efficiency post migration. These solutions enable IT teams to manage their cloud infrastructure at ease, without the need for extensive cloud expertise or custom coding.

Concierto MANAGE is a comprehensive SaaS solution designed for managing the entire lifecycle of applications and infrastructure across AWS, and on-prem environments. Concierto MAXIMIZE is a SaaS platform that combines operational, automation, and fin-ops analytics across AWS and on-prem environments, offering real-time dashboards, budget forecasting, and instant remediation through built-in automation.

MontyCloud DAY2 provides a no-code, autonomous CloudOps solution that helps IT teams provision, manage, and operate AWS infrastructure without writing code or needing specialized cloud skills.

By incorporating CloudOps solutions, you can ensure your migrated VMware workloads continue to run smoothly and efficiently.

Conclusion

These ISV migration solutions and many more offered through AWS Marketplace provide solutions to streamline and simplify customer migration journey to AWS. When choosing the right ISV migration offering, carefully evaluate your specific requirements, application landscape, and cloud strategy. By leveraging these solutions, you can navigate the complexities of cloud migration to unlock the full potential of AWS Cloud for your business.

With additional AWS investments that lower costs, customers can now more easily access the right solutions to help migrate and modernize their VMware workloads.

Are you ready to embark on your VMware migration with the support of powerful ISV solutions? The ISVs featured in this blog post, as well as many other solutions, are available on AWS Marketplace. Get started now by contacting the AWS Assessment Central team for help in selecting an ISV with a complimentary assessment.

Check out AWS Migration Acceleration Program for VMware and learn more about our overarching strategy, programs, and incentives.