In the last few days, I have worked with Cloud Providers looking to migrate their workloads to new environments (Greenfield). That is why I have decided to write about the different options and their benefits..
As we have already discussed in previous posts, there are different migration strategies. But today, I want to focus on what I consider to be the most common ones in Cloud Providers.
The first one is Repurchasing; Moving away from a perpetual license model to a SaaS model (VCPP one in VMware case)
Rehosting is an important strategy, involves a change in the hypervisor. In most of the cases Hyper-V.
Last but not least, Relocating migrating VMs from one virtualized environment to another without requiring changes. Legacy to Greenfield.
Regarding the type of migration, the goal is to migrate as many workloads as possible with the least downtime. So we will try to add the greatest amount of VM’s in Hot or Warm waves.
Hot
Known as live migration. The virtual machine stays powered on during the initial full synchronization and the subsequent delta sync, using the VMware vSphere® vMotion® feature.
Warm
Migration is a virtual machine that is actively running while it is being replicated to ensure minimal downtime.
There is a third option, but it is the one we will try to avoid, although not in all possible cases and it is known as Cold.
Cold
A Cold Migration is a virtual machine that is powered off before starting the migration. It is advisable to divide the migration into phases: Plan, Build, Migrate and Operate.
I will be talking about these 4 phases in my next Post.
