When considering a VMware to AWS migration, you may have concerns about your team's cloud skills, the potential for disruptions during large-scale migration, and the costs involved. At Simform, we understand these apprehensions and offer a comprehensive VMware to AWS Migration Assessment to address them proactively.

Simform’s VMware specialists and AWS solutions architects conduct a thorough analysis of your current environment, including the vSphere platform, vCenter Server, vSAN, and other components, to identify dependencies and potential migration complexities unique to your infrastructure. We then provide a detailed assessment report with tailored recommendations for bridging skills gaps through immersion days and guided support, as well as strategies for minimizing migration time, costs, and disruptions using purpose-built AWS services.

Product Brief

VMware to AWS Migration Assessment by Simform offers:

1. Virtual machine (VM) and application mapping

To start, our solutions architect helps you build a business case for migration using AWS Migration Evaluator, which provides costs and performance insights into your VMware VMs and workloads. We then create a detailed inventory of your VMware environment and map application dependencies using AWS Application Discovery Service (ADS) to inform the migration strategy.

2. AWS migration suitability assessment

Our experts assess application migration complexity using standardized business and technical criteria. This includes business impact, resources, security, compliance, storage (e.g., moving from vSAN or VMDK to Amazon EBS volumes), networking (e.g., transitioning from VMware NSX to Amazon VPC), OS, dependencies, and strategy complexity. Each criterion is scored and summed to calculate a total complexity score to help you prioritize applications and plan migration waves.

3. Migration approach and tooling recommendations

Based on the inventory and suitability assessment, we recommend the most appropriate migration strategy for each application–-rehosting, re-platforming, or refactoring. We also suggest the best-fit migration tools, such as AWS Server Migration Service (SMS), CloudEndure Migration, or AWS Database Migration Service, depending on your specific requirements and environment.

4. Cost optimization and licensing analysis

Our team performs a comprehensive cost analysis, comparing the TCO of running workloads on VMware versus AWS. This includes estimating costs for EC2 instances (considering reserved or spot instances), storage (EFS, S3), and data transfer. We also review your current VMware licenses and explore cost-saving opportunities like AWS License Manager, BYOL, or using AWS-native services.

5. Risk assessment and mitigation strategy

We identify migration risks such as compatibility issues with VMware tools, disruptions to high availability setups, and data loss/security vulnerabilities. We recommend mitigation strategies like using CloudEndure Migration for live migrations with minimal downtime, implementing Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing for high availability, and hardening security via AWS Web Application Firewall.

Our assessment is tailored to your needs, ensuring the proposed architecture and migration plan are optimized for your business goals and workloads.

You will also receive recommendations for how to best avail of and use various incentives and funding options offered by AWS for customers migrating from VMware to AWS.

Deliverables

• Detailed inventory of VMware components (VMs, hosts, clusters, storage, networking) with utilization and performance metrics

• Categorization of applications/workloads into migration waves based on criticality, complexity, and dependencies

• Recommended migration approach (e.g., rehost, re-platform, refactor) for each workload

• Detailed cost comparison between current VMware infrastructure and projected AWS costs, including a total cost of ownership analysis

• Customized migration strategy with a detailed roadmap, timelines, phases, and milestones