Oracle Cloud Migrations VM Discovery

During any migration process from one environment to the next, the struggle to discover all the virtual machines (VMs) in that environment is key to the success of the project. Migrations seem to be a long list of spreadsheets and manual work to ensure that you have all the assets accounted for in the planning stage of the migration project.

Wouldn't it be great to have an automated way to find all the VMs in the current environment and keep that list updated to ensure nothing gets missed during the migration process? Now we have one: The Oracle Cloud Migrations service. This service from Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is designed to provide you with a framework to discover your current environment, create an inventory of the assets, and offer transparency in pricing.

The discovery process creates an inventory of all the source VMs, allowing you to group them into migration projects and create multiple plans according to the needs of your business. These migration plans allow you to map your inventoried assets to the best matched OCI shapes, based on the performance metrics gathered in the discovery phase. They also provide a detailed cost estimate breakdown of all your migrating assets, based on the OCI tenancy rate card and the default Pay As You Go (PAYG) rates.

Discovery Methods

The Cloud Migrations service has two methods for building the migration inventory. The first is an automated discovery of the source environment with a remote agent appliance for VMware systems or uses the Amazon Web Services (AWS) API layer for EC2 instances. The second approach imports a CSV file that has the key data aspects required for migration. Each approach has pros and cons we discuss in detail in the following sections.

Automated discovery

Cloud Migrations provides automated discovery with the remote agent appliance. This VM appliance discovers all the VMs that are associated within vCenter, which can be done impromptu or scheduled. Scheduling ensures that all assets are captured before migration, especially for an active VMware environment where VMs are created regularly.

Manual import of assets

Cloud Migrations also allows you to import a CSV file with all the inventory of the source environment. You can download the necessary Cloud Migrations CSV template from the Inventory section under the Import Assets. You can use RVtools to gather the information and create your CSV that will be used to import your assets into the service. This approach allows you to inventory quickly but requires manual intervention and regular updates.

You must manipulate the CSV into the correct format for Cloud Migrations, but when you have the data from RVtools ready in the spreadsheet, you can import the CSV and add it as an inventory for Cloud Migrations. You won’t have all the runtime and historical metrics that automated discovery gives you, but it gives you the baseline for CPU, disk, and memory for each of the VMs.

Now, you have two ways to load your assets into the Cloud Migrations inventory system using automated discovery or an import of a CSV.

Grouping, planning, and pricing

After you have created the asset inventory in OCI, you must create a migration project and add the assets from the inventory to the project. Cloud Migrations only allows you to place the assets in one project, which is the first step in grouping your assets in the service. You can use a few methods to search for assets in the inventory, and you can save these searches to return to.

Grouping VMs

One easy way to start grouping your asset sources together is by using tags. With tags, you can create saved searches, based on user defined tags from your VMware environment, to reduce time looking for the VMs that you want to migrate.

Using the tags, you can group your assets into migration projects based on business needs, which helps better define your overall migration plans. Because inventory assets can be associated only with a single migration project, we recommend organizing your inventory assets at the migration project level.

Planning

Your next step is to create your migration plans based on your groups. After creating your migration project, add assets to the plan. This step is straight forward through the UI: click the Add Assets button.

Now that you have assets associated with your plan, you can define the strategies for each plan based on your business needs. For example, if you need to increase the CPU count for specific VMs, you can apply it to the shape of the asset. If you want to add a multiply or define a specific CPU, either Intel or AMD shapes, you can do that too. If you’re just building a development environment, you can use the OCI preemptible instances to provide a low-cost solution for development and testing.

You can also modify your plans strategies to better fit the needs of the migration when you need more computing power for your instances.

Pricing

You can see the cost of each plan within your OCI environment based on compute and storage requirements in the outcome of the plan. This pricing uses the Pay As You Go (PAYG) or your custom rate card if you have negotiated specific rates. This transparent pricing model allows you to plan and manage your performance in OCI.

Conclusion

The Oracle Cloud Migrations service provides you with a simplified discovery process. Using our automated discovery process, you can also manually populate your asset inventory by uploading a CSV with the details of your environment. Then you can begin the grouping your VMs based on your business needs. After grouping your VMs into migration projects you can build plans that best fit your business needs ensuring that when you do migrate to OCI,  you can manage your cost and performance.

Explore the options for migrating to your VMware VMs to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure native instances with the Oracle Cloud Migrations service. For more information, see the following resources:

• RVtools
• Oracle Cloud Migrations documentation
• Cloud Migrations QuickStart GitHub repository