Understanding VMware migration on AWS

What is VMware Cloud on AWS?

VMware Cloud on AWS provides standard VMware’s SDDC software extension to the AWS Cloud to run workload applications across VMware vSphere®-based private, public and hybrid cloud environments, very similar to IBM VMware Cloud offering. It integrates VMware vSphere, VMware vSAN and VMware NSX along with VMware vCenter management and elastic, Amazon EC2 bare-metal infrastructure that integrated as part of the AWS Cloud.

VMware Cloud on AWS is available across multiple regions, AWS Asia Pacific (Tokyo), AWS Europe (Ireland), AWS US West (N. California), and AWS US East (Ohio) , AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney), AWS US East (N. Virginia), AWS US West (Oregon), AWS EU (London), AWS EU (Frankfurt) and AWS GovCloud (US West).

What are the typical use cases for using VMware Cloud on AWS?

Some common use cases where customers want to use this service in order to adopt hybrid cloud:

1. Cloud Migration
2. Data Centre Extension
3. Disaster Recovery

1. Cloud Migration:

Migrate your existing on-premises applications and workloads to the cloud.

Typical Scenarios:

• Application migration: Customers want to move specific applications to the cloud due to specific business needs.
• Data centre wide migration: Customers want to consolidate data centres and move completely to the public cloud, this can be for wider cloud adoption, this is typical case of DC consolidation
• Hybrid Cloud adoption: Create an environment and provide an ability to move workloads between on-premises and the cloud at will. AWS and On Premises.

What is AWS doing for VMware.

• VMware Cloud on AWS uses the same VMware SDDC stack that customers were using on-premises. So easier to move across. Similar to IBM Cloud
• VMware Cloud on AWS extends the on-premises infrastructure to the cloud. Because of this consistent infrastructure, very little to change, extend NSX and this can be extended DC, similar to IBM VMware Cloud offering.
• VMware Cloud on AWS enables live application migration to the cloud with using AWS Availability Zone failure protection at infrastructure level as well as region level site protection with VMware Site Recovery.
• With VMware Cloud on AWS, customers can extend their current on-premises security and governance policies to the cloud.
• Encryption can be reused by the customer.
• Elastic Storage is extended for cluster on AWS Cloud.

Workload migrations options:

There are different ways to migrate your workloads:
1. Standard Cold Migration( Old school of thought):

• Cold migration, in this typical migration there is a considerable downtime involved since the VM is stopped, moved over to VMware Cloud on AWS and then restarted there, customer will need Hybrid Linked Mode setup and configured between your on-premises infrastructure and VMware Cloud on AWS.
• One option is to use VMware HCX for performing the cold migration.
• It is recommended to use cold migration for the applications that can accept downtime: e.g. Dev/Test workloads, Tier 3 applications that are rarely used.

2. Warm Migration:

• There is a downtime during migration.
• In this migration, VMs are replicated to the cloud and then customer can schedule when customer want VM to actually switch over to the cloud, requires a restart of VM.
• Use VMware HCX, vMotion with vSphere Replication or other supported replication tools for this migration.
• Recommended to use warm migration for large scale migration where customer want to migrate 100s of VMs together.

3. Hot/Live Migration:

• There is no downtime during migration. The VM is live on-premises and which is migrated from on-premises to the cloud.
• Some prerequisites, setup Hybrid Linked Mode and configured and a L2VPN established between your on-premises environment and your SDDC cloud, minimum of 250 Mbps for migration to AWS.
• This migration can be configured via different ways

o VMware vSphere vMotion or VMware HCX vMotion for doing live migration. Customer can use AWS Direct Connect for better speed and enhanced security.

o Configure VMware HCX vMotion along with vSphere Replication for a scheduled migration.

4. Content Library Import:

• In this method, customer can re-provision VMs from scratch using content library.
• In this case, customer publish content library from on-premises environment to vCenter server on VMware Cloud on AWS. Then customer can build a content library in VMware Cloud on AWS and subscribe to on-premises content
• library that contains all templates, OVFs, ISOs that customer need and pull that to the cloud and start synching and consuming those in the cloud.
• This method is useful when customer want to copy the existing content from on-premises to cloud and then provision the VM.

Typical products or technologies used for migration:

1. VMware HCX:

It offers bi-directional application mobility between any vSphere versions across on-premises and VMware Cloud on AWS. Customer can use VMware HCX for cold, warm, or live migrations, as well as take advantage of replication functionality. This service is included in VMware Cloud on AWS and there is no need to purchase it separately. Here are some of the important capabilities of VMware HCX:

• Supports on-premises vSphere versions 5.0 and above.
• Seamless bidirectional migration of workloads, no need to update application, OS, Network IP.
• Ability to bulk migrate 100’s of VMs.
• VMs can be migrated cold, warm (reboot) or live with no downtime.

Hybridity:

Important feature to note here is Hybrid Linked Mode. It links on-premises vCenter server to vCenter server in the cloud SDDC and shares the same identity store, providing a glass view of your on-premises + cloud SDDC environment.

Data Centre Extension:

Typical Scenarios:

• DC expansion:

o Customers from different locations want to expand and do not want to invest in building out a new data center

o Customers need capacity for new workloads without having to invest in over-provisioning or building new capacity on-premises

o Customers have capacity constraints on-premises to handle seasonal spikes in demand

Disaster Recovery:

Disaster recovery is delivered as a service for VMware Cloud on AWS.

Scenarios:

• New DR: Customers want to implement a DR solution for the first time
• Replace Existing DR: Customers want to reduce their secondary DR site costs by moving DR operations to the cloud or by modernizing existing DR solutions
• Customers want to protect additional workloads with a cloud-based DR solution for specific applications

Features and capabilities on AWS Cloud

1. Hybrid Linked Mode:

• Provides a single pane of glass to view to manage on-premises and Cloud resources in the VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC vCenter. This provides operational consistency and visibility across both environments
• Hybrid Linked Mode allows customer to link your VMware Cloud on AWS vCenter Server instance with an on-premises vCenter Server instance
• If customer link your cloud vCenter Server to a domain that contains multiple vCenter Server instances linked using Enhanced Linked Mode, all of those instances are linked to your cloud SDDC

o View and manage the inventories of both your on-premises and Cloud SDDC from a single vSphere Client interface

o Cold migrate and vMotion workloads between your on-premises data centre and Cloud SDDC directly from the UI.

2. vCenter Cloud Gateway:

• The vCenter Cloud Gateway is an appliance configured in your on-premises to connect your on-premises and Cloud vCenters
• The vCenter Cloud Gateway includes the vSphere UI interface and customers can use that UI to manage both their on-premises vCenter Server as well as the VMware Cloud on AWS vCenter Server.
• The vCenter Cloud Gateway experience is exactly the same as the Hybrid Linked Mode experience in VMware Cloud on AWS, with the exception that it is now running locally in your on-premises environment

3. vCenter Content Library:

• vCenter content library allows customer to keep OVAs, ISO Images, and scripts in sync between on-premises and in-cloud SDDC deployments
• Customer can deploy from, clone to, and sync VMTX OVF templates, mount ISOs, and even perform guest customization

4. Stretched Clusters:

• With stretched clusters, VMware Cloud on AWS infrastructure provides protection against failures of AWS AZs at an infrastructure level. Stretching an SDDC cluster across two AWS AZs within a region, virtual machine is restarted in the other AZ, thus providing 99.99% infrastructure availability, applications can span multiple AWS availability zones within a VMware Cloud on AWS cluster, Similar to IBM MCW environment.

5. Elastic DRS:

• Elastic DRS allows customer to set policies to automatically scale your cloud SDDC by adding or removing hosts in response to demand, while maintaining desired CPU, memory, and storage performance
• This recommends either scale-in or scale-out the cluster. A decision engine responds to a scale-out recommendation by provisioning a new host into the cluster. It responds to a scale-in recommendation by removing the least utilized host from the cluster.

6. Manage AWS Cloud( Expand and downsize)

• Add hosts:

o Customer can add hosts to SDDC to increase the amount of computing and storage capacity available in your SDDC, max up to 16 hosts per cluster and 20 clusters per SDDC

o Hosts are pulled from AWS’s pool of servers. ESXi is booted and fully configured including every VMkernel and logical network, and it is then added to vCenter/SDDC. After the host is connected to the network and added to the cluster, the vSAN Datastore is automatically expanded, allowing the cluster to consume the new storage capacity and begin to sync the vSAN objects

• Remove hosts:

o Remove hosts from your SDDC but customer must keep the minimum which is 3 hosts

• Add clusters:

o Customer can add clusters to a cloud SDDC up to the maximum configured for your account. Additional clusters are created in the same availability zone as the initial SDDC

o Logical networks customer have created for your SDDC are automatically shared across all clusters. Compute and storage resources are configured similarly for all clusters.

• Remove clusters:

o Customer can remove any cluster in an SDDC except for the initial cluster, Cluster-1.

o When customer delete a cluster, all workload VMs in the cluster are immediately terminated and all data and configuration information is deleted. Customer lose API and UI access to the cluster. Public IP addresses associated with VMs in the cluster are released.

7. Multiple Interconnectivity Options:

• VPN

o Configure an IPsec VPN to provide a secure connection to your SDDC. Route-based and policy-based VPNs are supported. Either type of VPN can connect to the SDDC over the Internet. A route-based VPN can also connect to the SDDC over AWS Direct Connect

o The VMware Cloud on AWS L2VPN feature supports extending VLAN networks. The L2VPN connection to the NSX-T server uses an IPsec tunnel. The L2VPN extended network is used to extend Virtual Machine networks and carries only workload traffic.

o An L2VPN on the Compute Gateway can extend up to 100 of your on-premises networks. VMware Cloud on AWS uses NSX-T to provide the L2VPN server in your cloud SDDC

• VMware HCX

o Provides high performance, multi-site interconnectivity capabilities by abstracting your infrastructure and allowing customer to interoperate across different versions of vSphere and different network types.

o Provides the ability to setup a WAN optimized multi-site IPSec VPN Mesh for secure site-to-site connectivity.

o Stretch Layer-2 networks and extend data centers between sites.

o Perform bulk workload migrations, live bi-directional vMotion with the ability to retain MAC and IP addresses.

• Using AWS Direct Connect:

o AWS Direct Connect is a service provided by AWS that allows customer to create a high-speed, low latency connection between your on-premises data center and AWS services.

o Direct Connect traffic travels over one or more virtual interfaces that customer create in your customer AWS account. For SDDCs in which networking is supplied by NSX-T, all Direct Connect traffic, including vMotion, management traffic, and compute gateway traffic, uses a private virtual interface. This establishes a private connection between your on-premises data centre and a single Amazon VPC.

Reference

Resources:

• Cloud Migration Buyers Guide: It talks about key factors to consider when migrating to the cloud and what are the application types and migration approaches customers should take into account while doing cloud migration.
• Cloud Migration Planning Guide: It highlights the best practices and methodology that should be followed when planning a migration to VMware Cloud on AWS.
• Cloud Migration Deep Dive Webinar: This webinar talks about the deep-dive technical capabilities on VMware Cloud on AWS for the cloud migration use case.
• Checklist and configuration details for Migrating Virtual Machines: It lists out the configuration requirements for each migration option.