Migration Evaluator features

Migration Evaluator is a migration assessment service that helps you create a directional business case for AWS cloud planning and migration. To project future-state cloud costs, Migration Evaluator provides a clear baseline of what your organization is running today and projects AWS costs based on measured on-premises provisioning and utilization. The software models compute patterns for all instances, showing the projected costs to re-host at AWS and the breakdown of costs by infrastructure and software licenses.

No matter where you are in your migration journey, Migration Evaluator works at all stages of migration planning.

If you do not have existing inventory and resource utilization data, or require a high level of accuracy, Migration Evaluator recommends installing a complimentary agentless collector. This tool is deployed on-premises and leverages read-only access to VMware, Hyper-V, Windows, Linux, Active Directory and SQL Server infrastructure. To learn more about the on-premises collector, please download our install guide on the resources page.

If you do have existing inventory, Migration Evaluator allows you to securely upload exports from 3rd party discovery and monitoring tooling. If gaps in hardware provisioning or utilization are discovered during import, industry benchmarks are automatically applied. To learn more about what type of data is required, please download our import template on the resources page.

If you have inventory and utilization already collected via the AWS Application Discovery Service (ADS), it can be used in a Migration Evaluator assessment. The same ADS collector can be used for Application Dependency Mapping within AWS Migration Hub and within Migration Evaluator.

The Quick Insights pre-migration assessment provides both business and technical stakeholders visibility into the projected cost of running their on-premises workloads in the AWS Cloud. Business stakeholders can download a one-page summary highlighting the estimated savings to re-host at AWS based on usage patterns with costs broken down by infrastructure and software licenses. For more a technical audience, detailed per-server and per-SQL-server data is also available. This export combines on-premises discovery data (server hardware provisioning, SQL Server configuration, and resource utilization) with recommendations for re-hosting to Amazon EC2 and Amazon EBS. Reports are updated automatically providing the most up-to-date data.

Migration Evaluator integrates the discovery of on-premises resources used for a business case with Migration Hub's Server Dependency Mapping. By optionally collecting active Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connections, you can use Migration Hub to visualize the server to server dependencies, create application groups, and identify the first set of servers to migrate.

After receiving your Migration Evaluator Quick Insights assessment, if your organization decides there is a need for additional insights you can request a Migration Evaluator Business Case. Migration Evaluator includes a team of solution architects to understand your migration objective (e.g. exiting a data centre, shifting from cap-ex to op-ex, or changing software licensing strategies) and use that data to narrow down a subset of best suited migration patterns. The results are captured in a Migration Evaluator Business Case that will help to align business and technology stakeholders, while providing a prescriptive next step in the migration journey.

A business case report is provided to the customer at the end of the migration assessment. This report includes 6 sections:

1. Analysis and Insights: Overview of collection strategy and timeline (existing data or agentless collector), assumptions, scope, server counts, and more. 
2. Financial Summary: Multiple workload specific 'what-if' purchasing scenarios.
3. Business Value: AWS Cloud Value Framework (inclusive of Staff Productivity, Operational Resilience and Business Agility), Sustainability Assessment (estimated carbon emission reduction versus on-premises workloads).
4. Deployment Summary: Detailed overview of Windows and Microsoft SQL Licensing options and optimization.
5. Storage Assessment (if applicable): A holistic view of on-premises storage landscape and data-driven mappings to target AWS storage services including projected costs.
6. Next Steps: Recommendations for the customer on next steps for a successful migration.