VMware Cloud on AWS Migration Planning - VMware Certifications

This post pulls together the notes I have made during the planning of VMware Cloud (VMC) on AWS (Amazon Web Serivces) deployment and migration planning of virtual machines from traditional on-premise vSphere infrastructure. It is intended as a list of considerations and not a comprehensive guide. 

Capacity Planning

• At the time of writing up to 10 SDDC’s can be deployed per organisation, each SDDC supporting up to 10 vSphere clusters and each cluster up to 16 physical nodes.
• The standard I3 bare metal instance currently offers 2 sockets, 36 cores, 512 GiB RAM, 10.7 TB vSAN storage, a 16-node cluster therefore provides 32 sockets, 576 cores, 8192 GiB RAM, 171.2 TB.
• New R5 metal instances are deployed with 2.5 GHz Intel Platinum 8000 series (Skylake-SP) processors; 2 sockets, 48 cores, 768 GiB RAM and AWS Elastic Block Storage (EBS) backed capacity scaling up to 105 TB for 3-node resources and 560 TB for 16-node resources.
• When deploying the number of hosts in the SDDC consider the pay as you go pricing model and ability to scale out later on-demand; either manually or using Elastic DRS which can optimised for performance or cost.
• The What-If analysis in both vRealize Business and vRealize Operations can help with capacity planning and cost comparisons for migrations to VMware Cloud on AWS. Use Network Insight to understand network egress costs and application topology in your current environment. If you are not licensed for these products download the free trial from VMware.

Migration Planning

• If possible your migration team should be made up of the following: Infrastructure administrators for compute, storage, network, and data protection. Networking and Security teams for security and compliance. Application owners for applications, development, and lifecycle management. Support and Operations for automation, lifecycle, and change management.
• Group services together based on downtime tolerance, as this could determine how the workload is moved: prolonged downtime, minimal downtime, and zero downtime.
• Virtual machines can follow a ‘life and shift’ model from traditional vSphere by enabling vMotion between the on-premise vCenter Server and VMC. HCX can stretch L2 subnets into VMC for seamless migration of workloads.
• There are additional requirements for hybrid linked mode if you are looking to vMotion machines into VMC, see here for full details.
• Consider migration paths for any physical workloads, whether that be P2V, AWS Bare Metal instances, or co-locating equipment.
• Consider any load balancing and edge security requirements. The AWS Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) can be used or alternative third party options can be deployed through virtual appliances. NSX load balancing as a service in VMC is planned for future releases.
• You will likely still need Active Directory, DNS, DHCP, time synchronisation, so use native cloud services where possible, or migrate these services as VMs to VMC on AWS.
• Remember Disaster Recovery (DR) still needs to be factored in. DR as a Service (DRaaS) is offered through Site Recovery Manager (SRM) between regions in the cloud or on-premise.
• Make sure any existing monitoring tools are compatible with the new environment and think about integrating cloud monitoring and management with new or existing external tools.
• Move backup tooling to the cloud and perform full backups initially to create a new baseline. Consider native cloud backup products that will backup straight to S3, or traditional backup methods that connect into vCenter. The reference architecture below has been updated to include Elastic Block Storage (EBS) backed Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances running Veeam; which will backup virtual machines from the VMC vCenter into Simple Storage Service (S3) and Glacier.

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