Cloud Management Platform VMware Cloud on AWS vRealize Suite

Low-Cost Migrations to VMWare Cloud on AWS with vRealize Cloud Management – Part 2

In my first blog of this series, I discussed if hybrid cloud is breaking promises, how applications benefit from a hybrid cloud approach, and the role of vRealize Cloud Management with VMware Cloud on AWS in your journey to the cloud.  In this blog I’ll dive deeper into how vRealize Cloud Management helps organizations accelerate their cloud migration to VMware Cloud on AWS. The goal here is to help you reduce the complexity, cost, and risk of cloud migrations compared to alternatives that require time and scarce skills.

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If you prefer to read all about the blog series now, you can find the complete story of what will be discussed in our eBook: 5 Ways to Improve Managing Your Hybrid Cloud.

Migrating to VMware Cloud on AWS

Let’s start with how cloud adoption is happening fast.

According to the 2020 State of the Cloud Report,
more than 9 in 10 enterprises (93%) have a multi-cloud strategy
and nearly 9 in 10 enterprises (87%) have a hybrid cloud strategy.

Basically, what it comes down to is the need for greater agility and access to the latest innovations that have driven cloud infrastructures to become increasingly attractive to organizations. Enterprises are migrating to the cloud to support their business growth, drive digital transformation, improve development cycles, and optimize costs. In addition, organizations are conducting a cloud migration to VMware Cloud on AWS without having to re-architect applications for the following reasons.

  • Application specific – Move specific applications to the cloud due to specific business needs or move enterprise applications such as Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, etc., to the cloud.
  • Application modernization post migration to the cloud – Utilize cloud-scale infrastructure and services to extend the value of existing enterprise applications or build new modern applications.
  • Data center wide evacuation – Consolidate data centers and move completely to the public cloud.
  • Infrastructure refresh – Refresh infrastructure due to hardware end of life, infrastructure software upgrade, etc., and want to leverage the opportunity to move to the public cloud.

Challenges of Cloud Migration

During this transition your organization might undertake several migration, post-migration, and modernization challenges that could increase time, risk, and costs associated with successful completion of these types of projects. In addition, organizations might face these challenges:

  1. Need for re-architecting or re-factoring applications to suit public cloud infrastructure
  2. Service disruptions due to downtime associated with migrating and modernizing mission-critical applications
  3. Learning curves and investments associated with skillset, tools, and process and governance changes needed to manage disparate cloud infrastructures
  4. Ensure post-migration application performance, resiliency and scale requirements are met while optimizing resource management
  5. Lack of integration abilities to easily and seamlessly leverage CI/CD methodologies, application catalogs, and native cloud services to enrich enterprise applications, due to a fragmented technology ecosystem
  6. Wastage of current IT investments while modernizing applications

How to Ease the Cloud Migration Journey with vRealize Cloud Management

VMware Cloud on AWS solves migration and modernization challenges by delivering a hybrid cloud service, and when paired with vRealize Cloud Management, the two can speed up and ease your migration to the cloud.

vRealize Cloud Management is extensible with many integrations and provides native support across hybrid cloud for consistent management. That’s why if you have applications on-premises and want to move them to VMware Cloud on AWS, vRealize Cloud Management is the best solution to meet your hybrid cloud management needs. vRealize Cloud Management helps accelerate the application migration by providing full visibility into component dependencies, costs, compliance, network requirements and the security posture, so migrating applications is simpler. As a bonus, IT teams enjoy consistent operations after migration.

For a cloud migration initiative, vRealize Cloud Management includes these comprehensive capabilities:

  • Assess and inventory infrastructure. Appropriately size VMware Cloud on AWS hosts and plan which VMs to exclude. In addition, learn all about the Cloud Migration Assessment tool by reading our vRealize Operations 8.3 release blog.
  • Conduct pre-migration cleanup. Right-size and reclaim resources as well as baseline performance before migration. Then further optimize after the cloud migration. For more details, read our blog about Rightsizing VMs with vRealize Operations Cloud.  
  • Discover applications and map dependencies. So you can build migration waves for VMware HCX, vRealize Network Insight Cloud can discover and lay boundaries around the applications then help plan the migration. With a fling script, vRealize Network Insight Cloud can pass that information to VMware HCX to group migration waves to migrate multiple applications dynamically.  For more details, read our blog about Integrating vRealize Network Insight Cloud with VMware HCX.  
  • Migrate using VMware HCX. Move applications seamlessly between environments at scale and avoid the cost and complexity of refactoring apps. Learn more about VMware HCX.
  • After the migration, verify health and performance. The application health is directly related to the health of the network to ensure that latency and other health metrics are in check. Take a minute to watch this video about what vRealize Network Insight Cloud can do to manage networking and security with VMware Cloud on AWS.
  • Enable end-to-end network visibility and troubleshooting. There are new capabilities in Assurance and Verification which reduce the time to troubleshoot networks and improve application performance. To learn more about how it works, read the eBook Proactively Manage Your Network, with Business Intent, and discover three use cases, including topology visualization, troubleshooting, and proactive problem detection.
  • Set up cloud constructs and automate provisioning with cloud-agnostic templates. Then provide your users with a self-service portal. For more information, read the blog about how vRealize Automation Cloud can create VMware Cloud Templates for Smart Infrastructure-as-Code.  
  • Ease Day 2 operations. vRealize Operations Cloud offers automated workload balancing, capacity optimization, and compliance. In addition, you can conduct bill analysis, cost optimization and pricing. Plus you can monitor and troubleshoot across on-premises and VMware Cloud on AWS. To see this in action, you can view three videos from Cloud Field Day 9 about operationalizing VMware Cloud on AWS with vRealize Cloud Management, including planning and migrating, managing applications, and self-service hybrid cloud.  
  • Enjoy event and log analytics for all your infrastructure. vRealize Log Insight Cloud manages massive amounts of data and helps you gain operational visibility and rapid troubleshooting across the VMware Cloud on AWS environment. For more information, read the blogs about the newest capabilities with vRealize Log Insight Cloud.

Don’t stop here, though.  The most important thing everyone forgets about with cloud migrations is discussed in our vRealize This LIVE podcast. The item is integral to migration planning and making sure your network is not forgotten. I’ll give you a hint because every day I learn just how cool it is. In terms of migrations, it’s vRealize Network Insight Cloud, and here’s what it can do (of which some is mentioned above) and expanded upon in the podcast:

  • Identify traffic flows between systems to fully understand your dependencies.
  • Help plan your networking requirements. Understand how much bandwidth is needed. Get a full understanding of the network topology and know what your connections are between on-premises and cloud. And analyze from where consumers are accessing your services.
  • Develop a firewall rule plan. Traffic flows and port information are readily available in vRealize Network Insight and can even be exported for automated firewall configuration.

Customer Examples

Let’s take a look at a few customers who have used vRealize Cloud Management and VMware Cloud on AWS for their hybrid cloud.  IHS Markit is a business information provider headquartered in London, and it serves more than 50,000 business and government customers worldwide. To speed their time to market, the company uses vRealize Cloud Management offerings, including vRealize Network Insight with VMware NSX-T to release products faster to maintain a competitive edge. To learn more about their journey, read the case study and watch the video about their successful cloud migration. Here’s what they have to say:

“We are making VMware vRealize Network Insight Cloud IHS Markit’s standard tool for application, network, and security visibility and troubleshooting.”
Andrew Hrycaj, Principal Network Engineer, IHS Markit

Another customer using vRealize Cloud Management with VMware Cloud on AWS is Induslnd Bank. The bank was established in 1994, primarily to serve the Non-Resident Indian (NRI) community, and it is known as the first among the new-generation private banks in India. VMware’s solutions helped the bank get centralized control over their applications hosted on-premises and on public cloud to bring agility in delivering business outcomes and consumer applications.

vRealize offered insight-driven operations for the IT team, enabling them to respond quickly to business disruptions. The IT team can now understand the IT architecture and data flow more precisely and take appropriate corrective actions, which has enhanced the bank’s business agility.

Benefits of vRealize Cloud Management and VMware Cloud on AWS

In addition to customers like IHS Markit and Induslnd Bank, organizations are experiencing these types of outcomes:

  • Save time: Reduce migration effort from multiple months to weeks and bring innovation faster to the market with modern applications.
  • Simple and Consistent: Gain consistent operations without the need for staff retraining or revamping of operational processes by reusing familiar skills and tools
  • Cost-effective: No application re-factoring or re-architecting needed during migration
  • Low risk: Migrate live without retrofit, run your applications on familiar and proven VMware environments combined with global AWS footprint, reach and scale
  • Accelerate innovation: Modernize IT infrastructure and applications with quick and easy access to the latest capabilities to seamlessly automate, provision and operate a hybrid cloud environment
  • Gain operational excellence: Improve visibility and application performance with self-service application and infrastructure provisioning while applying AI technologies to continuously optimize performance, workload placement, utilization, and costs
  • Improve control: Reduce costs and mitigate risks through unified operations and governance

Furthermore, VMware uniquely offers our customers the flexibility to choose consumption options of on-premises and SaaS, along with a hybrid subscription of both in a single license. It’s called VMware vRealize Cloud Universal.  It enables you to adopt a cloud-first model at your own pace while protecting existing investments as well as flex for data center extension and during uncertain cloud adoption schedules.  

No matter where your organization is in the cloud journey, you can make cloud your business with vRealize Cloud Management and VMware Cloud on AWS.

Summary

In my next blog we’ll dive deeper into the data center extension initiative and how vRealize Cloud Management can help ease your journey to VMWare Cloud on AWS.

For the complete story, download our eBook so you have all the information we’ll cover in the series in one place.

If you’re interested in moving ahead, you can start with vRealize Cloud Management on VMWare Cloud on AWS Pathfinder learning journey, try our vRealize Network Insight Cloud hands on lab, or request a conversation with one of our experts.

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Ellie Ruano

Ellie Ruano is a member of the VMware Cloud Management team and her responsibility spans across the vRealize and CloudHealth portfolio. Throughout her career she has been passionate about helping…

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