Seamless migration from any VMware environment to Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP and Amazon EC2

Over the last 20+ years, commercially available compute virtualization solutions such as VMware have become powerful tools used to lower costs, improve efficiency, ease management tasks, and improve on-premises flexibility. Over time, most cloud providers have added advanced storage, efficiency, and management capabilities to their hypervisors that match or exceed those available to traditional on-premises virtualization suites, while providing direct access to a myriad of cloud native service offerings. Simultaneously, the recent acquisition of VMware by Broadcom has brought about many changes in how VMware is sold and licensed both in the cloud and on-premises. If you find yourself considering alternative hypervisors, then fortunately for you moving from one hypervisor to another while simultaneously migrating the associated storage is no longer a hazardous and monumental task.

Today, as shown in Figure 1, we introduce a seamless, automated solution to migrate existing VMware VMs and storage from any cloud-based VMware solution, or from any on-premises VMware environment, to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and the combination of Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) and Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP. The migration process is non-disruptive until the brief outage to complete the cutover, and it supports any type of block devices on the source. Finally, your virtualized environment is truly mobile and agile across both hypervisors and storage devices! Now we can observe just how direct this is.

Figure 1: Conceptualized framework for automated VM and storage migration

Migrations the direct way

If you have ever done cross-platform large-scale virtualized migrations before, then you know the effort needed, risks involved, and complexity of managing the migration project to plan. An AWS partner, Cirrus Data Solutions, has recently added Amazon EC2 hypervisor, Amazon EBS, and Amazon FSx NetApp for ONTAP block support to Cirrus Migrate Cloud (CMC). Cirrus makes enterprise grade migration direct as shown in Figure 2. Make sure to look for the single-click enterprise migration at scale through MigrateOPs.

Figure 2: Cirrus Migrate Cloud architecture

MigrateOPs is a YAML driven (migration-as-code) migration orchestration tool. This is good enough theory, and in this demo video, we show a live migration of both Windows and Linux VMware VMs and their guest storage to AWS. Although the demo only shows two VMs migrated, MigrateOPs can orchestrate enterprise environments at scale, which eliminates the human risk factors and other sources of data loss and failed migrations.

I know what you’re thinking: your storage environment may be a bit more complicated. Now we can look at the storage protocols that you could be currently using for datastores in your on-premises environments. It could be most modern block protocols (iSCSI, SCSI over Fibre Channel, NVMe over Fibre Channel, NVMe over TCP), or perhaps NFS. The approach we present here can perform automated migration from any combination of the preceding protocols, as indicated in Table 1. 

Table 1: Sources, Targets, and Migration Tools

Amazon EBS is needed for EC2 instances to boot using the Amazon Machine Image (AMI), as shown in the rightmost column. However, in the preceding table, we can migrate block data to either FSx for ONTAP block service, or Amazon EBS, depending on which block service provides the best choice for a given workload. Some applications may be a best fit for Amazon EBS, but if you need Multi-Availability Zone (AZ) and Single-AZ (AZ) support, massive scale-up and scale-out performance capability, replication, thin clones, and data reduction technologies, then you should consider block storage on FSx for NetApp. CMC automatically builds/configures the FSx for ONTAP block storage and/or Amazon EBS to match the source and perform the migration seamlessly by configuring the AWS block storage to match the performance and capacity while following best practices. In fact, you can use this solution if you’re also targeting the Amazon EBS deployments.

The last two lines of the preceding table show source storage provisions shares (rather than a VMDK from a datastore) to the VM. In this case, a block-based migration tool can only migrate the OS volume, but not the data shares that are based on NFS. If the source NFS storage happens to be NetApp ONTAP, and the destination is FSx for ONTAP in AWS, then incorporate NetApp SnapMirror tasks into the Cirrus migration automation. If the NFS source datastore isn’t NetApp based, then we can use AWS DataSync to move the appropriate files to FSx for ONTAP to a file mountpoint and incorporate a final DataSync synchronization point into the Cirrus automated migration task.

Now that we have elegantly migrated our storage, how do we get the VMware VMDK files translated for use by the Amazon EC2 hypervisor, which uses AMIs? Traditionally we have used the EC2 Import/Export service and separate tooling to migrate storage. However, we promised a complete solution that encompasses storage and VM migration as a unit. If you’re familiar with VMware’s vMotion hot migration, then the Cirrus approach takes a similar path: migrate the underlying OS disk bit-by-bit while the VM continues to run. When the OS disk and the other ancillary storage has been migrated in the background, stun the VM, perform final sync, and cutover to the EC2 instance. Best of all, unlike vMotion, this migration environment is truly cross-platform, which allows VMs to move reliably between hypervisor types. As part of the migration, CMC automatically remediates each VM to the correct multipath and iSCSI configuration as needed for FSx for ONTAP block devices, such as building access groups so that the VM can access the new automatically provisioned matching FSx for NetApp ONTAP block devices. This high level of automation allows you organization to focus on what you’re migrating, not how. Here is one more detail: both the VMs and storage under migration are protected through snapshots to allow for the seamless rollback of a migration if needed.

Congratulations! You just learned how to make your data and VMs mobile and agile. Not only that, if in the future you decide to migrate from AWS, then it’s just as direct, and there are no penalties or fees to leave. Welcome to AWS!

Cleaning up

When your migration into AWS is complete, you can completely uninstall the Cirrus Migration software. If you’re testing migration in an AWS account, rather than migrating a real workload, then make sure to delete your migrated instances and associated Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP resources. Lastly, if you do plan to perform a proof-of-concept, don’t forget that you can use the AWS free tier and the free Cirrus demo license.

What we learned

Today you learned how to safely migrate VMware VMs from anywhere to Amazon EC2 and FSx for NetApp ONTAP using CMC. You can read more about the many reasons that other users are choosing this option for their VMware environments in this NetApp post and NetApp solutions guide.

If you don’t have an AWS account, but want to evaluate how this might work for your organization, then you can get started with an AWS account today. If you aren’t familiar with FSx NetApp for ONTAP capabilities in AWS, then you can explore the user guide. You can find out more about CMC on AWS Partner Marketplace, such as pricing, or get started with a free 1 TB license. Cirrus and AWS can also offer a complete turn-key solution to assist you in complex VM migrations. Finally, to help users reduce or eliminate their one-time migration costs, Amazon introduced the AWS VMware Migration Accelerator, which offers up to 400$ USD credit per migrated VM from any VMware cloud on an AWS environment to Amazon EC2 and FSx for ONTAP. For existing on-premises environments, check with your AWS representative for availability of Amazon EC2 and FSx for NetApp ONTAP migration credits.

What it means

It’s a new day out there. Your data and VMs are now cross-hypervisor mobile, and with AWS there is no fee if you ever want to migrate your data and compute somewhere else. By using the advanced storage capabilities of FSx for ONTAP, Amazon EBS, and Amazon EC2, you can build highly performant enterprise-class high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR)-capable environments in a cost-effective method. If your organization is interested in evaluating potentially moving your VM environment to AWS Storage and Amazon EC2, contact the authors of this post, or your local AWS representative. AWS can perform a comprehensive assessment of your VMware environment and produce a cost-effective and seamless migration plan.