As a leader in cloud infrastructure, AWS continues to grow with strong momentum. Customers are adopting cloud for more workloads or are thinking of migrating their existing on-premises data to the cloud.
However, the migration process isn’t always easy. Cloud and infrastructure leaders face the challenge of determining which applications to move and how to do it most effectively.
AWS offers many tools and services to help ease and accelerate the migration process from on-premises to AWS. Many vendors, including global system integrators and value-added resellers, can also help you with your migration.
In this post, we’ll explore how Pure Cloud Block Store™ and AWS Application Migration Service can help cloud infrastructure architects and IT leaders address the challenges of cloud migration, as well as provide an enterprise cloud experience that is consistent with what leading on-premises storage vendors offer. These integrations and deployment best practices are of course provided with no additional licensing costs to Pure customers. Let’s get started.
Simplify Your Cloud Migration to AWS
AWS provides several tools and services for cloud migration. AWS Application Discovery Service collects and discovers source server specification information and data insights. AWS Database Migration Service is designed for migrating databases quickly and securely. In this post, we’ll be using AWS Application Migration Service.
AWS Application Migration Service is an agent-based migration tool that requires you to install an agent in your source server. The agent will automatically discover the server on the AWS console. It will then start the replication process. It uses contentious, block-level replication which enables you to perform non-disruptive tests prior to cutover. After testing, you can quickly cut over and finalize the migration in a short window of time.
Enterprise-Grade Storage in the Cloud
We just looked at AWS tools to orchestrate migrating and duplicating operating systems and their applications to the cloud. But, once they land in the cloud, the toolsets previously provided by SAN storage are lost. This includes thin provisioning, data reduction, instant snapshots, and more.
Pure Storage® FlashArray™ and Pure Cloud Block Store fill this gap. With the replication capabilities of Purity, data sets can be directly replicated from on-premises FlashArray devices to cloud-deployed Pure Cloud Block Store so features aren’t lost in the cloud migration. Pure Cloud Block Store offers the same enterprise-grade storage features as FlashArray on-premises. Now, let’s look at how to perform a migration from on-premises to AWS using validated steps and integrated tools from Pure.
Cloud Migration Architecture
The figure below illustrates an example architecture for the solution. The source environment consists of a virtual machine running on an on-premises FlashArray device with VMware infrastructure. The virtual machine is configured with two virtual disks. Note: To move the disks to Pure Cloud Block Store, they need to be either vVols or RDMs. If they aren’t, you’ll need to convert them to the vVol format by using Storage vMotion or cloning them to a vVol datastore. The boot disk can be any type, any boot volume, and any data volume. Each volume will have its own migration path as shown below.
The reason behind this separation is that AWS EC2 instances are locked to EBS (AWS-managed) disks for booting. Therefore, AWS Application Migration Service will handle the migration and conversion of the boot volume. On the other path, the data volume will be migrated using async replication between FlashArray and Pure Cloud Block Store. Combining these two parts offers a simple and efficient migration path for even the largest of virtual disks.
Summary
Pure Storage provides seamless data mobility with simple, efficient replication from on-premises to cloud or from cloud to cloud. Integration with AWS migration services and tools, like AWS Application Migration Service, delivers a reliable, easy, and fast way to modernize your applications.
Read more about how to migrate your VMware workloads to AWS in the end-to-end migration process guide.
See the technical document on AWS Outposts with MySQL .
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See how you can migrate seamlessly to Azure with Pure Cloud Block Store and Azure Migrate.
