Migrating VM from Azure to AWS

In 2020, we worked with a client who wishes to migrate their organization’s all mission-critical servers to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud to facilitate geographically assigned teams to work seamlessly, securely, and safely.

Moving virtual machines (VMs) to the cloud has historically been a daunting process. Client wanted a solution that is fast, efficient, and secure.”

Our team at HEX64 led the migration of their VMs from Azure to Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. AWS has some tools that made the migration process faster and smoother.

Our approach included the following 3-step methodology:

• ThoroughAssessment of Current and New Servers
• Cloud AdoptionPlanning andStrategy
• Migration Roadmap

Through this comprehensive approach, we were able to realize that AWS’ Simple Migration Service (SMS) extends its assistance to provide for VMs migrating over from Azure to AWS, making using an existing app over to AWS cloud a more straightforward manner.

Azure customers can forget about replicating individual servers and use SMS to migrate their VMs and apps over in one handy kit.

This agent-less service does it more relaxed than ever to automate, schedule, and track server migrations on a bigger scale, decreasing migration time and reducing the chance for failures during the process.

Prospective clients shifting their services from Azure to AWS will be pleased to hear that all the abilities offered as part of its migration service come free of cost, only pay for the resources you use on other services like S3, EBS, and EC2.

By hiring HEX64 for this migration project, we were able to achieve the following:

1. Meet client’s expectations:Meet the client’s business requirements according to schedule and budget, with assured SLAs during the transition.

2. Service availability: Achieve improvement client’s service availability to their internal and external stakeholders.

3. Business continuity: Monitor utilization and continuity of business services across their servers and databases.

Additionally, by using AWS, the client was able to experience the following benefits:

1. Cloud migration: Customers can start to shift their initial group of servers in just a few clicks via the AWS Management Console. Once the process has started, AWS SMS manages the details of the migration, automatically replicating live servers and creating new machine images.

2. Organize multi-server migrations: AWS SMS operates server migrations, enabling users to configure and schedule replications ahead of time and pursue progress across apps.

3. Incremental server testing: With help for incremental replication, AWS SMS gives fast, scalable testing of the servers you take over. The small, incremental adjustments made to your servers through AWS SMS enable you to examine those modifications iteratively and save money on network bandwidth.

4. Supports replication across a range of operating systems: The tool helps the replication of operating system images containing Windows, as well as various important Linux configurations.

5. Minimal downtime: AWS SMS’s incremental server replication cuts the possible impact that app downtime could have on your business operations.

1. Costs

The majority of companies today opt for a multi-cloud approach to migration.

Leading cloud providers have rolled out a wide range of products and services to facilitate that approach, but that does make cost calculations a little more complicated for customers looking to move—an issue complicated by the ever-growing range of stock-keeping units (SKUs) available today.

An organization may want to move workloads from one cloud to another for any cause, from better contract terms to a weak relationship with their current provider and past.

Taking your services into the cloud is a compact technical process, but going one vendor to get on board with a new provider can be even more difficult from a business aspect.

Take cloud exit charges, for example. These charges apply when you leave a provider and want to shift your data out of their systems, and can influence your choice when moving in the first place or leaving providers later on in the partnership.

Even if the movement between Azure and AWS becomes more disengaged commercially, that doesn’t ensure equality across application programming interfaces (APIs).

2. Secure Access

A separate concern was secure access to services running in AWS. Putting a server on the Internet and giving access to it directly by a real IP is pretty unsafe from a security viewpoint. Hence, we determined to set up two networks in AWS – an internal network without Internet access, where all the servers would be located, and an external network including Internet access. A software router, which is also a VPN server, runs between these two networks. Thus, in order to get access to the servers, it is required to connect to the VPN. Basically, AWS has its individual solution for VPN access, but it has an additional charge.

AWS Server Migration Service (SMS) Connector, EC2-VM, etc.