AWS Cloud Operations & Migrations Blog
Accelerate VMware Migrations to AWS using AWS Migration Hub Journeys
In January 2024, we introduced Migration Hub Journeys to guide and accelerate the migration and modernization of applications. Journeys help optimize planning, execution, and tracking through task-based templates with expert guidance, specialized tools, and cross-team collaboration, enabling you to migrate and modernize applications seamlessly. Today, we’re excited to publish new migration journey templates for AWS for VMware, enabling you to rapidly migrate and optimize VMware workloads from on-premises, other clouds, or VMware Cloud on AWS to AWS native services.
What is AWS Migration Hub Journeys?
AWS Migration Hub Journeys is designed to templatize migration projects and orchestrate tasks between internal and external project contributors. Journeys offers users a comprehensive migration journey, empowering them to execute and track their migrations from start to finish. These journeys are where experts, processes, and tools can be brought together to streamline the migration experience.
Figure 1: Overview of how Migration Hub Journeys journey work
Some of the key features of Journeys include:
- Migration planning: provides a structured way to plan your cloud migration.
- Prescriptive guidance: provides guidance in the form of migration templates.
- Execution and tracking: allow you to manage the migration tasks, monitor progress, and address any issues that come up along the way. You can see the status of your migration in real-time.
- Collaboration and governance: make it easy for various stakeholders to work together on the migration.
What’s new in Migration Hub Journeys?
We are adding new templates to enable rapid migrations of VMware based workloads to AWS. These templates are designed to align with the AWS Migration Methodology and provide a pipeline of tasks to allow customers to migrate to AWS efficiently. A migration journey, which is a pipeline of migration-related tasks created from these templates, will guide you through the process of assessing and discovering your infrastructure’s current state and understanding your current licensing estate by gathering necessary details. The templates also guide you through tasks for creating landing zones with necessary networking, security, and governance controls, and migrating your resources to AWS. In addition, the templates will guide you through tasks for migrating to AWS cloud native services.
Figure 2: AWS provided Migration Hub Journey Templates
AWS for VMware migration templates
The VMware to AWS EC2 migration template is a set of tasks categorized into Assess, Mobilize, Migrate, Modernize, and Operate phases. Each phase is divided into several modules, which are further divided into tasks and subtasks. You will see VMware relevant guidance for a particular task from the templates to enable you to efficiently execute and track your migration.
For example, in the Assess phase tasks, you will see guidance on using RVTools to gather server utilization information which will feed into the business case. Additionally, AWS has migration assessment programs and partner solutions which can provide precise migration business case during assess phase. You will also see guidance in the tasks to understand your current application/vendor licensing and how you can leverage AWS to improve price performance. In the Migrate phase tasks, you will see guidance on selecting tools specific to the migration scenario, such as using AWS Application Migration Service (MGN) replication. This information is presented to you in the respective tasks so you can perform the tasks with the required context.
Figure 3: Tasks board for Migrate phase
Similarly, other phases of VMware to AWS templates are also broken down into several modules, tasks, and subtasks. Following the recommended flow to make migrations easier to execute and track by showing all the required steps to successfully migrate to AWS.
Execute your VMware to AWS Migration
In this scenario, you create a migration journey using the VMware to AWS EC2 migration template. After you create the journey, add, modify, and remove tasks to customize the journey to suit your needs, and invite other users (including partners and AWS personnel) to collaborate. You can also create a custom journey solely based on your needs, easily. Based on privileges, users can assign individual tasks to experts, get automatic notifications for delayed or blocked tasks and upload artifacts in one place to ensure context is never lost. See Creating a Journey to get started and understanding the anatomy of Migration journeys.
Figure 4: Creating a journey from the template
Once the Journey is created, you will be redirected to the journey’s dashboard (Figure 5) where you will see the Journey details, and Journey summary section which provide a single pane of glass view into the overall health of the migration journey and allow you to quickly dive into sections assigned to you. Admins can also facilitate collaboration by inviting other individuals from the migration space, or the team from a migration space, or even invite individuals from outside your migration space such as AWS personnel or partners.
Figure 5: Journey dashboard
Although there are multiple ways (block level replication, VM import/Export, Partner solutions) to migrate VMware servers to AWS with near zero downtime, AWS Application Migration Service (MGN) is the primary migration service recommended for rehosting VMware-based workloads to AWS Cloud.
As an example, consider you have decided to migrate, AWS MGN supports both agent-based (Figure 6) and agentless (Figure 7) approaches to replicate servers from on-premises to AWS. The Agent can be installed on both Linux and Windows individual servers. You must install the AWS Replication Agent on each source server you want to replicate with AWS Application Migration Service.
Figure 6: AWS MGN Agent-based Migration architecture
In Agentless approach, you can add source servers from vCenter without installing an agent through the agentless replication feature as well. After the AWS MGN vCenter Client has been installed, it will discover all the VMs in your vCenter environment and add them to AWS MGN.
Figure 7: AWS MGN Agentless Migration architecture
Tasks and sub-tasks in Migration Hub Journeys templates will guide you through the migration process using agent-based or agentless methods. They allow you to track all steps, task owners, timelines, issues, and actions required during your migration enabling you to migrate successfully.
Conclusion
We launched new Migration Hub Journeys templates for AWS for VMware to enable customers to rapidly migrate and optimize VMware based workloads to AWS. By adopting these templates, you will be able to facilitate collaboration between stakeholders, AWS personnel and partners, efficiently plan, and execute a migration ensuring a smooth transition to the cloud. In addition, you will be able to leverage scalability, enhanced security, increased reliability, and improved performance with AWS’ extensive global infrastructure.
Kick-start your migration journey with AWS Migration Hub Journeys. Sign in using your AWS Builder ID today.
You can also dive into the workshop to gain a comprehensive understanding of Journeys and how it can transform your migration process.
See the following for additional resources on Migration Hub Journeys and executing migrations for VMware workloads to AWS
Harnessing AWS Migration Hub Journeys to Accelerate Migrations and Modernization
Migrate VMware virtual machines to Amazon EC2 with the AWS MGN replication agent
Agentless snapshot-based replication for vCenter source environments
Accelerate vCenter Migration using AWS Migration Service Agentless Migration
AWS VMware Migration Accelerator
How to migrate VMware server to AWS EC2