Amazon Q Developer agents for transformation of VMware workloads

We are excited to announce the public preview of Amazon Q Developer transformation capabilities for migrating and modernizing VMware workloads. Amazon Q Developer can assist your developers and IT professionals with many different tasks—from coding, testing, and upgrading applications to diagnosing errors, performing security scanning and fixes, optimizing AWS resources, and now migrations and modernization. Q Developer transform for VMware has advanced multi-step planning and reasoning capabilities that includes accelerating large-scale transformation of enterprise workloads with domain-expert generative AI agents supervised by modernization teams in a unified collaborative web experience.

Virtual machines running on VMware workloads have become fundamental building blocks of enterprise IT infrastructures, providing a flexible and scalable foundation for organizations to deploy and manage applications efficiently. Yet, the migration and modernization of the on-premises workloads to the cloud come with their own challenges – often long, costly, labor-intensive, and error-prone processes. For example, migration projects require specialized skills to set up cloud environments for operating applications. Migration practitioners need to manually convert on-premises network configurations to AWS equivalents, such as Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), subnets, and security groups. In addition, they need to identify dependencies across hundreds of on-premises virtual machines (VMs) and migrate dependent VMs together to provide business continuity. Consequently, they often seek migration expertise and tools to facilitate migrations and modernizations to meet their business objectives.

Q Developer transform for VMware has been built on 18 years’ worth of AWS expertise. Therefore, it can help you simplify and accelerate your transformation journey without the need of developing a lot of skilled expertise. In internal tests, AWS teams used Amazon Q Developer’s transformation capabilities to translate VMware network configurations for 500 virtual machines (VMs), generating AWS networking configurations such as VPCs, subnets, transit gateways and internet gateways within 1 hour. This is 80 times faster compared to the 2 work weeks taken with traditional manual approaches.

Image 1: Transform Job Plan

Generative AI-enabled automation

When migrating on-premises VMware workloads to Amazon EC2, there are several challenges. For example, the underlying compute, storage, and network constructs are different. In order to migrate resources from an on-premises hypervisor, all the primitives that typically reside within environments such as vSphere, need to be recreated in AWS, including networking components. Q Developer transformation agents for VMware allow customers to inventory and discover these on-premises components using collectors or file imports and provide a comprehensive view of a VMware footprint.

Image 2: Dashboard

Typical enterprise VMware workloads are large and have been running for years, forming large and complex environments that are labor intensive to move to the cloud — often taking several months of manual effort. This complexity can lead to migrations being deprioritized due to the level of effort required to complete rehosting projects. In large-scale migrations, having a solid plan can limit risk of downtime and result in a more predictable outcome. Q Developer transform for VMware’s capabilities provide generative AI-driven transformation plans and recommendations that are based on your on-premises inventory, dependencies, stated business objectives, and agent-infused VMware expertise to enable resource-efficient modernization.

In addition, Q Developer transform for VMware provides an AI-driven web experience, with collaboration capabilities, and allows natural language chat with autonomous generative AI agents for generating plans, facilitating collaborative team reviews and approvals, and quickly resolving issues. Thus, providing an end-to-end experience from a single place, minimizing context switching between multiple services or tools.

Q Developer transform for VMware also provides automated network conversions, which save weeks or months of specialized work with AI-agent driven automation of analysis and conversion of complex VMware networking configurations to native AWS constructs. The agents combine the generated artifacts, including the wave plan, the AWS network configuration, along with EC2 sizing recommendations to generate a comprehensive migration plan. The plan is editable and can also be used to initiate server migration using the AWS Application Migration Service (MGN).

Image 3: Infrastructure as Code (IaC) code generated

Since VMware to EC2 migrations can run for extended periods, even lasting for months in some cases. Q Developer transform for VMware also has observability capabilities such as dashboards for job progress and a work log, with full context of results of completed work. The work log also includes any intermediate artifacts generated during the project’s lifecycle, so decisions taken by the agents or a human can be provided as a comprehensive history of the transformation.

Image 4: WorkLog

Reduce costs and enhance innovation, security, and resilience

Q Developer transform for VMware also provides financial benefits, by eliminating third-party licensing fees when moving VMware workloads to EC2 instances with optimized compute, storage, and networking architectures.

Image 5: Amazon EC2 instance optimization

Migrating VMware workloads to Amazon EC2 native instances opens up opportunities to modernize application development with over 200 AWS services, including leveraging AI/ML and data services for impactful business insights, thus accelerating innovation.

Q Developer transform capabilities are designed with compliance in mind, providing detailed audit logs of all migration activities, aiding in compliance reporting. It uses fine-grained access control principles, leveraging AWS IAM Identity Center, ensuring that only authorized personnel can access migration data and execute tasks.

Getting started

To get started, you will need an Amazon Q Developer Pro subscription. For step-by-step guidance, visit the Getting started with Amazon Q Developer Transformation Capabilities for VMware or the Getting Started page. If you are exporting you network configuration from a VMware NSX environment, also follow the Exporting network configuration data with Import/Export for NSX blog.

Conclusion

This blog post highlights how using Q transform for VMware can help organizations unlock the power of generative AI to migrate and modernize their VMware based workloads to Amazon EC2 in a more simple, automated, and secure fashion. For more information, visit the Amazon Q Developer transform for VMware product page.