AWS Step-by-Step
Migrating Workloads with AWS Application Migration Service, Part 2
To actually do the migration, you'll need to access the AWS replication agent first. Here's how, using Windows Server as an example.
In Part 1, I walked you through the process of setting up the permissions necessary for migrating a server to the Amazon Web Services cloud.
Now, I want to show you what the actual migration process looks like. For the purposes of this article, I will be migrating a Windows Server.
Downloading the Agent
Before you can migrate your server, you will need to download the AWS replication agent. To do so, log into AWS and then launch the AWS Application Migration Service. Select the Source Servers tab and then click on the Add Server button, shown in Figure 1.
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Figure 1. Select the Source Servers tab and click the Add Server button.
At this point, the AWS console will display the Add Server screen. Set your preferred operating system to Windows, as shown in Figure 2. Now, paste your IAM Access Key and IAM Secret Key into the fields provided. When you are done, click the link to download the installer.
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Figure 2. Set the operating system type to Windows.
Installing the Agent
Now that you have downloaded the agent, you will need to install it onto your Windows Server. Create a folder on your server (you can call it anything that you want) and copy the agent to this folder. For the purposes of this article, I have copied the agent to the C:\Temp folder
Next, open an elevated PowerShell session, navigate to the folder where the installer resides, and enter this command:
.\AwsReplicationWindowsInstaller.exe --region <your region> --aws-access-key-id <your access key> --aws-secret-access-key <your secret key> --no-prompt
You can see what this looks like in Figure 3, though the keys have been partially obscured.
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Figure 3. This is how you install the agent onto a Windows PC.
When the agent installation process completes, you should see a message within PowerShell telling you that the agent was successfully installed. After a few minutes, you should also see the server listed in the Application Migration Service's Source Servers section, as shown in Figure 4.
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Figure 4. My server has been added to the Application Migration Service console.
Now that everything has been set up, the next thing you have to do is to wait for the replication process to complete. This can take quite a bit of time. While I was writing this article, I set up a Windows Server to use for a test migration. Although this server was running a default configuration, the replication process took about eight hours to complete.
When everything is ready, you should see the Migration Lifecycle column reflect a status of Ready for Testing. The Data Replication column should be displaying a status of Healthy, as shown in Figure 5.
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Figure 5. It's important to make sure that your migration is ready for testing.
Test Your Instance
The next step is to test your instance to make sure that it has been imported correctly and that there aren't any problems. To do so, select the instance and then click the Test and Cutover button (shown near the bottom of the previous figure). Choose the Launch Test Instance option from the resulting menu. This will cause AWS to create an EC2 instance that is based on the machine that you are migrating. You can connect to this instance and verify that it is functioning properly.
Complete the Migration
Assuming that your test was successful, you can go ahead and perform a cutover, which means switching to the cloud-based copy of the server that you are migrating. To do so, click on the Test and Cutover button once again, and then choose the Launch Cutover Instance command from the shortcut menu.
Once you have completed the cutover, it's important to test the migrated server again to make sure that it is working properly. If everything seems to be OK, then you can click the Test and Cutover button and then select the Finalize Cutover option from the menu.
Technically, this completes the migration process, but there may be some additional tasks that you need to perform, such as changing DNS settings or decommissioning the on-premises copy of the server.
About the Author
Brien Posey is a 22-time Microsoft MVP with decades of IT experience. As a freelance writer, Posey has written thousands of articles and contributed to several dozen books on a wide variety of IT topics. Prior to going freelance, Posey was a CIO for a national chain of hospitals and health care facilities. He has also served as a network administrator for some of the country's largest insurance companies and for the Department of Defense at Fort Knox. In addition to his continued work in IT, Posey has spent the last several years actively training as a commercial scientist-astronaut candidate in preparation to fly on a mission to study polar mesospheric clouds from space. You can follow his spaceflight training on his Web site.