When migrating an on premises VM to the public cloud, moving the virtual machines is the easy part. Getting the applications fully functional is the challenge.
Recently a client had to exit its legacy infrastructure. Migration to Cloud was the answer, and after exploring the market, AWS was their Cloud provider of choice. However, time constraints prevented us from creating a new build. As you know, AWS and other off the shelf Cloud services work best with a new build.
Off the shelf will only take you so far, and then you need to fall back on your techie expertise to meet your clients’ needs. We thought our experience might help you, and so with this post we are sharing our pre and post migration advice.
In this case, we had to quickly migrate the on premises VMs to Cloud, balancing speed vs costs. A tool called ‘Boomerang’ met our migration criteria.
We took our usual, systematic approach, considering the variations in vendor technologies, diverse users, and licencing, and factoring in simpler things like identifying the DNS and firewall rules. This approach made migration easier, faster and smoother.
Our approach worked, but here’s a word of warning:
Don’t even go down this path unless you have a thorough understanding of your application portfolio, based on a comprehensive assessment.
For example, make sure you identify your application inter-dependencies and that you are aware of your network and security constraints. Otherwise your applications may not work as expected.
Download the pdf of our step by step procedure to migrate an on premises VM to the public cloud here: AWS Migration Checklist