Cevo recently worked with an organisation who had planned a migration from their on-premises VMware to VMware Cloud (VMC) on AWS, before Broadcom acquisition of VMware. After discussions with Cevo, they decided to pivot to an AWS-native solution just weeks before the scheduled migration kick off.
This sudden shift brought extra challenges to the migration as the organisation had no experience with AWS and decades of experience with VMware. How would this change affect their current skills? Would they be able to support an AWS native environment going forward? How would they deal with the tight turnaround?
Cevo approached this issue with a four-pronged attack:
- Using the best AWS native tools
- Heavy customer involvement
- Knowledge transfer
- Post-migration support
The right tools for the job
After reviewing all the tools available, and due to the nature of the customers’ requirements, Cevo recommended using AWS Application Migration Service to migrate the applications from on-premises VMware to AWS native. This service enabled the customer to sync their data into the AWS environment without impacting their ongoing production workloads. Then when the migration occurred the process was expedited as the data was already there, and seamless. It also meant their on-premises production workloads were still intact and usable in a “worst case scenario” during or after migration.
Customer involvement
Another crucial step in the process was having the customer involved in the entire project. If Cevo had moved all their workloads and set up the environment without customer involvement, it would have left the customer with an environment they were not confident in supporting independently.
During the implementation of the AWS environment, the customer was included in all decisions and was hands-on in building the resources where applicable. This was their first taste of AWS, so it was important to give them a good first impression. They were able to set up their VPCs, accounts and security groups all while learning about AWS.
Knowledge transfer
Cevo ran many knowledge transfer sessions with the customer so that we could impart as much information to them as possible about how AWS works, and how their production workloads would exist in the AWS environment. Every topic covered also had a documentation piece included, and the training sessions were recorded. This meant that they could go back at any time and review the documentation, or re-watch the training session, if they needed a refresher on the content.
Some of the topics covered were:
- AWS 101 – The Console, IAM, VPC’s, Security Groups
- AWS Migration Service Application
- Instances, EC2 and CloudWatch
- Systems Manager – Remote connect and patching
- Disaster Recovery
Post-migration support
While the customer went from being “scared” of AWS to being “very confident” during the build, setup and migration process, it was important for Cevo to be there after migration as well. This meant that any small issues that were not foreseen in the earlier stages could be covered after the migration. Although in this instance there were very few outstanding issues, it meant the customer was confident that they had the support they needed.
By following these steps, Cevo successfully guided our customer through a successful migration from on-premises VMware to AWS-native and are well on their way to being AWS experts.
At Cevo, these are the types of projects we are experts at, helping customers to not only migrate to the cloud but to become experts in the environment. No matter the time scale or the workload, we can work with any customer to get the job done.
