Migrate for Compute Engine is your rocket ship to Google cloud.

Powerful architecture

Cloud adoption and migrations have continued to accelerate over the years. It is a big move which also creates a lot of questions. A common misperception is that migrating existing workloads to the Google cloud, especially those with a lot of data, is complex, time-consuming, and risky. With the right planning, however, enterprise IT organizations can rapidly establish good migration practices to accelerate migrations and lower risk.

There are a lot of things that you need to consider when planning a migration:

• How do you choose which service you need?
• How will you test your migration before moving it?
• How can you minimize any downtime associated with migration?

Migrate for Compute Engine by Google Cloud has the answers. It is Google’s managed service used to move your application or some of your infrastructures from your current cloud providers i.e. Azure, AWS, and on-premises VMware vSphere, Hyper-V environment to Google cloud compute engine.

Whether you’re looking to migrate one application from on-premises or one thousand enterprise-grade applications across multiple data centers, migrate for Compute Engine gives any IT team, large or small, the power to migrate their workloads to Google Cloud.

The importance of this is that:

You don’t have to spend effort in designing and implementing a reliable toolchain to manually evaluate how your VMs behave in Google Cloud, and then manually migrate them.

It accelerates and simplifies mass migration projects, which saves you time and money in labor and hardware, reduces security risks, improves your agility, and lets you focus on improving your workloads.

Best of all, the end-to-end migration journey is centralized in the cloud console. In the migration dashboard you will be able to see the migrations in flight, view migration events, manage sources and targets, and create VM groups so that you can perform bulk migration tasks on multiple VMs at once

Pricing: Customers migrating to Google Cloud may use Migrate for Compute Engine software at no additional cost. However, Google Cloud charges for resources like Compute Engine instances, Cloud Storage, Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Logging, and networking bandwidth used during your migration.

Migrate for compute engine is fast because the real-time streaming means it takes minutes for workloads to run in the cloud. It is simple as well because the agentless technology reduces labor requirements and automatic adaptation to the cloud makes the transition easy.

It is scalable because unique WAN optimizations empower moving hundreds of servers per hour, plus built-in capabilities to manage large migration batches of complex, multi-tier applications with near-zero downtime.

It is reliable as you can test before you migrate with no interruption to production systems on-prem and enjoy the safety net of instant stateful rollback to on-prem if needed.

WHAT ARE THE KEY FEATURES OF MIGRATE FOR COMPUTE ENGINE

Advanced replication technology: Migrate for Compute Engine’s advanced replication migration technology copies instance data to Google Cloud in the background with no interruptions to the source workload that’s running.

Pre-migration validation and testing: Migrate for Compute Engine’s test-clone capability allows testing of production workloads and data directly in the cloud without impacting production or live systems.

As a service: Provisioning and right-sizing of cloud instances. Migrate for Compute Engine provides support for customizations to networking, dedicated instances, and encrypted disks. You also get analytics-based rightsizing recommendations for both cost and performance.

Automatic and seamless adaptations: With Migrate for Compute Engine, there are no manual changes required to the applications, images, networks, storage, or drivers. This includes driver/agent installations, networking, licensing, and more. No required manual changes to the applications, images, networks, storage, or drivers are required when migrating popular operating systems and versions.

Programmable operations: With Cloud API you can enable automation of the migration flow using the orchestration/automation tools of your choice.

Stateful rollback: In the unlikely event applications don’t operate as planned, you don’t have to stay.

HOW THE SERVICE WORKS.

Migrations simply work, at scale, in a managed service fashion. With Migrate for Compute Engine V5, there’s no requirement for provisioning or managing migration-specific resources in the cloud. V5 uses replication-based migration technology to lift and shift workloads from source environments to Google Cloud. Source VM disk snapshots are periodically replicated in the background by the Migrate Connector with no interruption to the source workload. Replicated data is encrypted in transit and at rest. When you instantiate a migrating VM using a test-clone or cut-over, the Migrate for Compute Engine service adapts your source VM to boot and run natively in the cloud.

The migration journey of a VM to the cloud is comprised of the following steps:

1. VM data replication of source workload: VM disks are periodically replicated to the cloud with no interruption to the source VM. You can control replication frequently and Pause/Resume replication at any point in time.
2. Configure landing zone target: You can migrate VM to any Google Cloud project in your environment, landing zone details can be updated at any time before executing a test clone or cut-over.
3. Test migrating VM: Test-Clone creates a copy of your source VM in the defined landing zone to validate the VM in the cloud before executing a cut-over. You can repeat test-clone multiple times to multiple landing zones.
4. Cut-Over migrating VM: Shut down your source VM, perform final sync to the cloud and instantiate the VM in the cloud. In the entire process, this is the only point where the workload experiences minimal downtime.

CONCLUSION

Migrate for Compute Engine’s unique technology delivers a smooth migration journey and provides tangible benefits throughout the entire process. Save up to 5 hours per server during migration and eliminate costly on-prem hardware and software licenses. Pay only for what you need in the cloud and avoid costly hardware purchases.