Migration & Modernization

Accelerate VMware migration to AWS with Experience-Based Acceleration

Introduction

If your organization runs VMware workloads on-premises or in another cloud and needs to migrate to AWS without disrupting operations, Experience-Based Acceleration (EBA) provides a proven path to do it fast. Using a structured three-day EBA workshop with AWS, organizations have moved multiple critical applications to AWS in days. Their engineers built hands-on migration skills and left with repeatable playbooks to accelerate the full migration.With an EBA, you can compress months of migration work into three days. In this immersive, outcomes-focused workshop your engineers and AWS specialists work side by side. Following a short and focused planning phase, you complete real migrations during the event itself. You leave with working systems in production and a team equipped to execute subsequent migration waves without AWS support.In this post, you will learn how a three-day EBA accelerates a large-scale VMware migration. You will see the key success factors behind the workshop and how the EBA process works in detail. You will also get specific steps to start your own migration with AWS.

The Challenge

Organizations running VMware workloads in on-premises data centers or in other cloud environments often face hard deadlines: exit the current environment and move to AWS within a fixed timeline. These servers run critical applications, each with complex dependencies between them. Getting that mapping right is essential before any server can move.The EBA provides a solution for three primary challenges:

  • Uneven migration experience. Teams across the organization have different levels of cloud knowledge. This skills gap creates risk.
  • Competing priorities. Engineers still have to keep systems running, which leaves limited time for migration preparation.
  • Complex interdependencies. With hundreds of servers, understanding which applications depend on which requires careful, systematic discovery work before wave planning can begin.

Organizations need a way to accelerate decision-making, close skill gaps fast, and establish patterns that can scale across the full portfolio. That is where the EBA comes in.

What is an Experience-Based Acceleration (EBA)?

An EBA is a structured, hands-on program that compresses months of cloud migration work into days. It brings your engineers, architects, and program leaders together with AWS specialists for a focused, uninterrupted sprint where real work gets done.Here is what makes an EBA different from a standard migration engagement:

  • You migrate real workloads during the event. There are no demos or simulations. Applications move to AWS during the three-day workshop itself.
  • Your team does the work. AWS specialists guide and support, but your engineers run each migration step. That builds genuine, lasting capability.
  • Decisions happen on the spot. Having the right stakeholders in the room means you can resolve blockers in minutes instead of days.
  • You leave with repeatable patterns. Every migration follows a documented playbook your team builds during the event. Those playbooks scale to your entire portfolio.

How the EBA Accelerates Your Migration

The speed comes from removing the gaps that slow most migrations down. In a typical migration, a question about architecture might sit in an email thread for a week. In an EBA, the right people are in the room and the answer comes in minutes. That pattern repeats dozens of times across three days.The EBA also distinguishes between two types of decisions. Reversible decisions, ones you can undo if needed, are made quickly and moved past. Irreversible decisions get the time and care they deserve. At Amazon, we call these “two-way doors” and “one-way doors.” This framework keeps the team moving while effectively managing risk.The hands-on approach is equally deliberate. Each migration step is a teaching moment. Your engineers do not watch AWS do the work. They drive every action, with AWS support available throughout. By the end of the workshop, your team has skills that would have taken months of trial and error to build, compressed into three days.

A Typical EBA: From Planning to Production

In a typical three-day EBA, more than 20 participants attend from both organizations, including cloud engineers, architects, program managers, and senior leadership.The workshop focuses on three outcomes:

  • Targeted migrations. The team identifies critical applications for live migration during the event, choosing those that represent the most common patterns in the broader portfolio. Solving them once creates a reusable template.
  • Team training through real work. All participating engineers work directly on migrations during the workshop. Each person leaves with hands-on experience using AWS Application Migration Service, Amazon EC2, and AWS Transform.
  • Architecture improvements. Dedicated breakout sessions identify specific opportunities to improve the migration approach, including wave planning for remaining servers and right-sizing recommendations from AWS Transform to optimize compute costs.

Four Weeks of Preparation Make Three Days Count

The speed of the EBA depends on preparation done before day one. In the four weeks before the workshop, the team:

  • Installs discovery agents on target servers to map all application dependencies
  • Loads discovery data into a centralized view to build a complete picture of the estate
  • Runs AWS Transform to generate right-sizing recommendations for each server
  • Defines wave one scope and confirms the applications for live migration during the event
  • Aligns stakeholders so all technical and business decisions can be made on day one

By completing this work in advance, the team enables the three-day workshop to focus entirely on execution.

The Migration Architecture and Tooling

The migration moves VMware workloads to AWS using a proven replication-based pattern. The replication approach produces copies of the environments in AWS and maintains synchronization until time of cutover. This method facilitates system testing and minimizes downtime for transition to the new platform.

  • AWS Transform. Serves as the central discovery and assessment platform. It collects detailed performance, network, and dependency data from each server. That data feeds directly into wave planning and right-sizing decisions. AWS Transform also generates right-sizing recommendations based on actual VMware utilization data, helping organizations size EC2 instances accurately and avoid over-provisioning.

Note: AWS Transform has superseded AWS Application Discovery Service (ADS) with advanced capabilities for automation and AI. This tool now provides automated application dependency mapping, AI-driven automation, and integrated storage and database discovery.

  • AWS Application Migration Service. Serves as the replication engine. It continuously replicates each server to AWS, keeping a synchronized copy ready for cutover. During the EBA, teams use Application Migration Service to execute the final cutover for each application.
  • Amazon EC2. Hosts each migrated workload in the target environment. Teams deploy EC2 instances across multiple Availability Zones to protect against single points of failure.

Typical Results from VMware Migration EBAs

Following four weeks of preparation, teams run the three-day EBA and consistently achieve results such as:

  • Multiple VMware applications successfully migrated to AWS during the event
  • 20+ engineers trained through hands-on migration work
  • Reusable migration playbooks created during the event and ready to scale
  • AWS Transform right-sizing configured for the full VMware migration portfolio
  • Breakout sessions identifying platform improvements and wave planning refinements

EBAs also produce results beyond the workshop itself. Organizations commonly report that within weeks of the event, additional applications move to production using the playbooks built during the EBA. The three-day workshop creates a migration engine that keeps running on its own.

What Makes an Experience-Based Acceleration Work

Based on our experience running EBA engagements across many enterprise migrations, the following factors determine whether an EBA reaches its full potential:

  • Executive sponsorship. Senior leadership confirms that the migration is a priority and gives the team permission to focus fully during the three days. That signal removes competing priorities before the event starts.
  • The right people in the room. Engineers, architects, and decision-makers are together. When a question comes up, the person with the answer is present. Decisions take minutes, not days.
  • Cross-team participation. Teams that would normally work in separate queues work together throughout the event. That collaboration removes handoff delays and surfaces dependencies early.
  • Clear decision framework. The team separates reversible choices from permanent ones. Reversible decisions are made quickly and documented. Permanent decisions get deeper review. Both move forward without slowing each other down.
  • Focused execution. Participants set aside day-to-day tasks for the duration. That focused attention is what makes three days of an EBA equivalent to weeks of normal project work.
  • Repeatable patterns. Creating documented playbooks and runbooks during the EBA enables teams to replicate success across subsequent migrations. Standardization reduces risk and accelerates execution velocity.
  • Willingness to adapt. When the team discovers something unexpected, they adjust the plan. The EBA structure gives teams the authority and flexibility to do that in real time.
  • Ambitious targets. Setting goals that require real effort energizes the team and leads to applications completing cutover ahead of schedule.

Begin Your Experience-Based Acceleration Journey

Contact your AWS Account Team and ask about Experience-Based Acceleration. To initiate an EBA, your account team will connect you with EBA specialists who will scope the workshop based on your objectives and intended outcomes. With these clear goals, the team will begin 3–5 weeks of EBA planning and preparation, leading to the 3-day EBA event.

Conclusion

Large, complex VMware migrations do not have to take years to gain momentum. In three days, an EBA enables teams to migrate critical applications, train 20+ engineers, and build the playbooks to accelerate remaining server migrations.The EBA works because it removes the gaps that slow migrations down. Decisions happen in the room. Engineers learn by doing real work. Patterns get documented as they are created. The result is a migration engine that keeps running long after the workshop ends.Your migration can start the same way — with a focused three-day sprint that moves real workloads and builds the team capability to keep going. Contact your AWS Account Team to scope your EBA today.

AWS Resources for EBA and VMware Migrations