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AWS Service Moves Virtual Workloads to the Cloud
Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) this week launched a new service to help organizations migrate their on-premises workloads to the cloud with minimal downtime.
The AWS Server Migration Service (SMS) is now available to customers out of AWS' Northern Virginia, Ireland and Sydney regions. It's designed to enable organizations to migrate their virtual infrastructures to AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) with minimal maintenance or disruption to their uptime, according to the company.
"This service simplifies and streamlines the process of migrating existing virtualized applications to Amazon EC2," said AWS evangelist Jeff Barr in a blog post Monday. "[I]t allows you to incrementally replicate live Virtual Machines (VMs) to the cloud without the need for a prolonged maintenance period. You can automate, schedule, and track incremental replication of your live server volumes, simplifying the process of coordinating and implementing large-scale migrations that span tens or hundreds of volumes."
SMS creates a new Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for each server volume that it replicates, Barr said. Users can test each AMI before their migration is done.
To use SMS, customers must download the AWS Server Migration Service Connector, which "runs within your existing virtualized environment, and allows the migration itself to be done in agentless fashion," according to Barr.
After downloading the Connectors, users can access SMS through their AWS Management Console. From there, users can pick which servers to replicate, schedule replication frequency and monitor current migration jobs.
AWS' documentation notes that SMS is limited to the following:
- "50 concurrent VM migrations per account
- "90 days of service usage per VM (not per account), beginning with the initial replication of a VM. We terminate an ongoing replication after 90 days unless a customer requests a limit increase."
SMS is free to use, though customers pay for how much Amazon S3 storage their replications take up.
AWS' announcement comes less than two weeks after it inked a deal with virtualization giant VMware that included, among other things, support for easier virtualized-application migrations.