While making your mind to plan the migration of your Virtual Machine, Applications, and Data, you get number of questions in mind whether or not we should migrate the workloads to cloud. If yes, then which applications should and should not be migrated. Below listed questions should be ready before we deploy the SDDC on VMware Cloud on AWS. Below mentioned figure is showing the decision tree.

Before starting the migration, you need to decide if all the data, applications, and virtual machines are going to migrate form On-Premises to VMware Cloud on AWS.

If you have decided to migrate set of workloads, then evaluation is required for what exactly needs to be migrated. If everything needs to migrate then next step is to evaluate the priority of those data, applications, and virtual machine according to business and technical criteria.

Once analysis is done, then the next step is to evaluate the priority of applications that which is needed to migrate at high priority then who would have least priority.

Other points you must make sure about the accurate mapping of the applications with Virtual Machines. You should have information handy that which application is hosted on which Virtual machine. If there is any tiering based application, that should also be considered. This is to ensure that once we start migration, none of dependent virtual machine should left which cause a problem to accessibility of applications.

Now you need to gather sizing information, data analysis, and application weighting of the workloads based on Application Complexity, Performance, Business Need, and Cost. This can be done using multiple tools, which includes vRealize Business for Cloud, vRealize Network Insight, and vRealize Operations.

After doing all the analysis, you need to decide the migration tool which can be used to migrate the applications, data, and virtual machines from On-Premises to VMware Cloud on AWS.

Now on the final step of this strategy, you are ready to migrate your workloads to datacenter hosted on VMware Cloud on AWS. You need to decide how you want to perform the migration. There are several options available and you may choose one of them as listed below, depending on pros and cons as per your requirement.

• Reprovision from Scratch
• Colt Migration
• Live Migration
• Hybrid Cloud Extension

As per VMware Cloud on AWS Checklist, this complete strategy is defined as below.

• Deploy collection and analysis tools used for data collection.
• Gather technical criteria data about your applications and VMs.
• Create migration weighting framework used for ranking migration candidates.
• Analyze data and update weights for applications and VMs to rank.
• Review migration options and determine your company’s strategies.

There are couple of several migration services available from VMware as listed below.

• Connectivity and Readiness Assessment
• Application Discovery and Dependence Mapping Assessment
• Cloud Value and Workload Placement Assessment
• Disaster Recovery as a Service Deployment