Purpose of the article: How to migrate a virtual machine from VMware to AWS.

Intended Audience: Cloud – Managed services – IT Infrastructure – network and server.

Tools and Technology: VMware, AWS

Keywords: VMware, AWS, AWS SMS

CloudEndure provides the Migration Solution and Disaster Recovery Solution from On-premises/other cloud providers to AWS. Cloud Endure Migration helps us simplify and automate the large-scale migration to AWS, and continuous data replication occurs in the background. Continuous Replication ensures that data is synced in real-time and minimizes the cutover process.

In this article, we are migrating the Windows 2019 Virtual Machine from VMware Workstation to AWS using CloudEndure.

Pre-requisites:

• VMware Workstation Pro with Windows 2019 virtual machine installed
• CloudEndure account (Free account)
• AWS Account with admin privileges
• AWS Access Key and Security key

Step 1: Log in to the CloudEndure portal using https://console.cloudendure.com/#/signIn, and it creates a default project for us.

Now click on the Create new project button to create the project, mention the project name, and click on CREATE PROJECT.

Step 2: Then, it prompts Welcome to CloudEndure; just click on START, and it will prompt Project Not Set Up! Click on continue to set up the project. So, here we need to mention the AWS Access Key ID and AWS Security Key ID. We need to have either Admin user or click on the project must have these permissions link. Immediately IAMPolicy.json will be opened in a new tab, right-click on the tab, click on the save button and save it on the preferred location.

Log in to AWS Console to IAM, create a policy using the saved file, create a user, assign the policy, and copy the Access Key and Secret key.

Step 3: Next step is to create Replication Settings. Here, Select the Migration source as Other Infrastructure and Migration Target as AWS US East (Northern Virginia).

Replication Servers: We need to choose the size of the replication server. The replication server will be deployed on AWS infrastructure, and it will take care of all replication jobs.

Subnet: We can choose the existing subnet, or we can choose the default; if we choose to default, AWS will automatically create the subnet for the VM.

Security Group: We can choose the existing one, or we can choose the default.

And need to mention all the other options as per our requirement and click on SAVE REPLICATION SETTINGS.

Step 4: Once we click on SAVE REPLICATION SETTINGS, the Project setup complete prompt will be opened, and it will show us how to install Agent on the Source virtual machine. As we are chosen the windows virtual machine to migrate, we need to download the Installer file as shown in the below screenshot. And need to install the installer file in the source virtual by running the below command in the command prompt.

Step 5: Open the windows virtual machine, which is to be migrated, and place the installer file as expected location. Now open the command prompt in a location where this installer is residing as shown in the below screenshot and run the command as specified in the CloudEndure.

Now we are going to get a window of CloudEndure where it will identify the number of disks available, download the CloudEndure Agent and install it automatically. To verify if the agent installation is successful or not it is required to check if the CloudEndure service is running on the local services of the virtual machine.

Step 6: Now navigate to the Machines page in the CloudEndure portal, we should get the virtual machine by its name, and it will create firewall rules in a target, and it will identify all the virtual machine configuration, operating system, installed applications, etc.

Step 7: If we go to the AWS console, you can see the CloudEndure Replication Server will be automatically deployed on the specified VPC in replication settings. This replication server is responsible for all the migration jobs and migration activities from the CloudEndure.

Step 8: Now come back to the CloudEndure portal, Automatically Initial Sync process will also start, and for the newly migrated virtual machine, we can set up the required configuration under the blueprint (like Machine Type, Subnet, Security Group, Elastic Ip and Public IP, etc.,). Click on save. Whatever the instance, you will get it in AWS. It will launch with these blueprint settings.

Step 9: To complete the Initial process, it will take time depending on the size of the virtual machine and the Internet speed. Once the initial process is done, we will get the below screen. And if you want to know what exactly happened in the background, we can refer to the Event logs on the console.

Step 10: Now, we can launch the target machine with the defined blueprint. Click on the LAUNCH TARGET MACHINE, and we can launch it in Test mode or Cutover mode. And I am going with Cutover mode in this article. Once we click on the Cutover mode, it will pop up the message. Click on the Continue button.

Step 11: Now, the Target machine will be launched. Once we go to Job Progress, we will find everything regarding the migration activity.

Step 12: Once it denotes successful completion, go to AWS console, and check if the virtual machine is showing up. Verify that the virtual machine is started and check the configuration details match with the blueprint.

I hope this article will help you understand migration using CloudEndure.