VMware Migrations to AWS

VMware has recently undergone significant changes to its licensing model following its acquisition by Broadcom, with one of the biggest shifts being the move from perpetual licenses to a subscription model.

For many, this uncertainty has made migrating to public cloud providers a viable alternative. Prior to Broadcom’s changes, some organisations were not comfortable with the OpEx cost model of cloud providers. Some businesses liked the flexibility and ability to build applications from component services offered by public cloud, but were deterred by the upfront cost of migrating from VMware. However, those perspectives have now changed. The cost calculations that made VMware seem the ‘safer, predictable’ option have been upended, and for many companies it’s important to reassess cloud platforms as the next step.

Staying ‘as is’ is no longer automatically the cheapest option.

For organisations concerned about the upfront cost and complexity of migrating a large infrastructure estate to a cloud provider, AWS offers funding options to help offset migration expenditure. 

During the MAP process, businesses work with an AWS MAP Partner, who will guide them from the initial assessment, through the architecture design and funding provisions, to the migration of production workloads.

Migration Process

The Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) provides a structured approach as well as financial incentives for customers wanting to migrating to AWS from VMware¹.

• The Assess phase analyses the current infrastructure, and builds the business case for migrating to AWS, including cost analysis

• The Mobilise phase focuses on the detailed technical architecture in AWS, including capacity management, resilience & redundancy, security and operations, and deploying the foundations for the migration

• The Migrate and Modernise phase is the staged migration of workloads into AWS while maintaining service availability. Also during this phase, legacy applications or designs may be updated by, for example, moving to managed services to reduce the operational overhead associated with managing infrastructure.

There are a number of tools to help with the planning & migration of workloads to AWS. Application Discovery Server assesses the current state, visualising application dependencies and network connectivity; Migration Evaluator uses this discovery data to help build the business case for migration; Application Migration Service helps to plan the migration of application groups, then migrates VMs to EC2 instances (or RDS). The replication functionality minimises downtime by avoiding ‘big bang’ data cutovers, and enables extensive testing in AWS before switching over workloads.  

Financial Incentives

AWS MAP offers incentives of AWS credits and funding, which help to offset the upfront costs associated with migration, such as planning, testing and professional services. The incentives are banded, according to the size of migrated workloads and the associated annual AWS costs. 

Risk Mitigation

The structured approach of MAP enables a detailed risk assessment to be carried out, and appropriate mitigation plans to be implemented. Using the Mobilise phase to prepare the AWS environment, and to migrate test workloads, enables detailed migration & cutover plans to be developed. Splitting the workloads into logical migration waves makes them more manageable, and keeps risks to a minimum, while maintaining traction for the overall migration.

Right-sizing and Flexible Capacity

AWS offers greater flexibility for capacity management, enabling accurate right-sizing of infrastructure resources to optimise costs. This process is based on actual usage metrics, and AWS tools help to visualise and recommend capacity changes. For variable load applications, capacity can be dynamically scaled, enabling costs to more closely track actual usage.

Conclusion

The changes to VMware licensing has created great uncertainty for organisations’ infrastructure management & planning. Previous cost calculations of remaining on VMware vs migrating to cloud providers have changed significantly.  Assessing this new financial outlook, together with funding incentives such as MAP, means that moving to AWS could be the most beneficial alternative.

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