Announcing Initial Availability of VMware Aria Migration

Following the tech preview from VMware Explore US and the beta announcement at VMware Explore Europe last year, we’re excited to announce the initial availability of VMware Aria Migration!

Try the Free Migration Assessment with VMware Aria Migration

Sign up now to get access to the free migration assessment capabilities with VMware Aria Migration. We’ll send you an email with instructions on how to access the service.

As organizations move along their cloud journey from a single dedicated infrastructure to a flexible multi-cloud model, IT teams face the decision not just where to deploy new applications and workloads, but whether to migrate existing applications and workloads. The latter introduces a host of challenges associated with the key steps of assessing, analyzing, planning, modernizing, executing, and operationalizing the migration of workloads across multiple clouds.

Introducing VMware Aria Migration

VMware Aria Migration is a multi-cloud migration service. It helps simplify and accelerate one of the most difficult tasks many organizations face in their multi-cloud journey. It identifies and migrates workloads and applications to the optimal cloud, based on your goals for security, performance, cost, and time.

Over time, we plan to release three core migration capabilities – assessment, planning, and execution. With this initial release, VMware Aria Migration provides the assessment capabilities.

And great news! The migration assessment capability is FREE! Yes, you read that correctly. VMware will be offering migration assessment capabilities for free. The free assessment service reduces the time and effort required to scope a planned migration and understand its target cloud requirements as well as TCO impact. Free also means that there is no requirement to subscribe to any other services to create migration assessments using VMware Aria Migration.

Note: The free migration assessment is for workloads up to 2,000 VMs and 500,000 network flows. The real-time vCenter(s) inventory and dependency collection is for the first 30 days. The assessment data will be deleted after 30 days.

Subsequent releases will provide the remaining planning and execution capabilities to complete the solution as an end-to-end service, providing you with a seamless migration experience. The migration planning capability is designed to help reduce migration risks with the ability to design target cloud configuration and plan / schedule migration pipeline enabled by data-driven decisions. The migration execution capability is designed to help automate migrations with workflows, providing peace of mind with the ability to measure, analyze, report, and roll back. The complete solution will be made available as a paid subscription service.

Migration Use Cases (Scenarios)

VMware Aria Migration is planned to support migration use cases (or scenarios) across various cloud environments. This initial release supports migration assessments from on-premises vSphere environments to VMware Cloud on AWS, and we will continue to add more use cases to the free migration assessment. Regardless of the choice of target for assessment, core capabilities of discovery, application grouping and dependency analysis can still be used by all customers as part of this release.

VMware Aria Migration – Migration Assessment Key Features

The assessment service provides accurate assessments based on live data collection, enabling you to make data driven decisions. In other words, you can make actual inventory-based assessment from your own vCenter(s). You can also import (e.g. from RVTools) and add data offline in layers. You can also export data from VMware Aria Migration for use with other tools.

The service applies Machine Learning to discover your applications, by automatically grouping machines into applications, including grouping them into resource usage-based categories (e.g. high, medium, low storage, CPU or Memory).

You can then leverage the system intelligence to scope the migration based on your migration style (e.g. by vLAN, by applications). Flexible filters allow for coarse grain or fine scoping as well (e.g. based on cluster, vCenter tag, resource usage, vCenter folder).

You can further analyze application dependencies to properly scope your migration, gaining insight into what you might include or exclude.

Finally, you can perform a cost-benefit analysis of VMware Cloud on AWS in comparison with your existing on-premises environment.

Business case assumptions are customizable and aligned with Cloud Economics models, including cost drivers such as server & storage hardware, VMware and OS licensing, maintenance, networking, labor, and data center. The assessment service provides projected target cloud TCO for business case building, provides source cloud TCO for comparison, and provides resource utilization comparisons that help up-level migration assessment to a business conversation. SDDC sizing recommendations are aligned with VMware Cloud Sizer to give you accurate sizing recommendations.

The costs used in the assessments come with default values, but these cost drivers can be tweaked on the assumptions tab. Tweaking these costs can improve the accuracy of the TCO analysis.

Explore and try out the migration assessment risk free. Visit our product page to learn more about what’s included in the free assessment. Sign up now to get access to the free migration assessment capabilities with VMware Aria Migration. We’ll send you an email with instructions on how to access the service.

Learn More

VMware Aria Migration is built on and integrates existing VMware technologies (with more coming soon) to provide a seamless binding interface and a single point of discovery and analysis. To learn more, visit us online at VMware Aria Migration and check out these additional resources.