Take Control of Your Cloud Migrations

However, as multicloud continues to embed itself in enterprises’ digital transformations, these businesses must weigh the expected benefits of cloud—namely scalability, performance and agility—against the inherent lack of control over the hypervisor that comes with it. For most enterprises, retaining this control over their IT environment without the added responsibilities of managing and maintaining the underlying infrastructure rates high on their wish lists.

Flexential introduced its industry-leading Hosted Private Cloud – Advanced Access solution this year to address the organizational need to maintain control over the vCenter hypervisor. Now, Flexential has enhanced this industry-first product to make cloud migrations faster, easier, and devoid of downtime with its new advanced migration feature.

What is Advanced Migration?

Advanced Migration provides enterprises with independent and direct migration capabilities across their cloud environments. Using the advanced migration tool, customers can form secure, software-defined (SD) connections between the source and destination cloud environments, creating a hybrid interconnect that enables bidirectional virtual machine (VM) mobility. From here, customers can choose mobility paths, transfer applications and workloads, and test and validate the success of the move without Flexential intervening or managing the process.

With the Advanced Migration tool, customers have complete control and oversight of the migration process—allowing them to schedule and implement the move on their own timelines to improve agility and eliminate delays on the cloud service provider’s side. Enterprises can also better manage their multicloud strategies and ensure the right workloads reside in the right environments to optimize performance, strengthen security and improve operations.  

Multiple Migration Options for Diverse Needs

In addition to offering a new level of control over VM migrations, Advanced Migration offers several migrations options to address the specific time sensitivities and uptime demands of various workloads.

Option 1: Cold Migration

A cold migration allows businesses to migrate individual VMs from their existing cloud to or from another IT environment. The VM is powered down at the source side, replicated and then migrated. When the move is complete, the VM is brought back online. Because the VM is offline for a stretch of time, this option is best suited for applications and workloads that are not sensitive to downtime, such as sandbox or development environments.  

Option 2: Bulk Migration 

Advanced Migration also allows customers to schedule large-scale migrations with minimal downtime. With this option, groups of VMs—potentially hundreds—are replicated before being powered down to limit interruptions. Once copied, the VMs are taken offline, transferred to the new environment and then powered back on upon completion. The multi-VM movement is the best option for extremely time-sensitive migrations that cannot tolerate long periods of inaccessibility, such as transitioning a test or staging environment to a production environment.

Option 3: Live Migration

Live migration allows organizations to move individual VMs with no downtime. With this option, VMs are replicated in real time during the migration. The live motion limits the number of VMs that can be migrated at once, which lengthens the migration time. This solution is ideal for workloads where downtime is unacceptable, but migration delays are acceptable. For example, with CRM or HRIS applications, which are imperative to internal business operations, but don’t impact revenue generating business capabilities.

Table 1: VM Migration Options

Embracing Advanced Migration

Gaining the agility to easily migrate VMs and control where workloads live delivers a variety of benefits for enterprises—beginning with strengthening their multicloud strategies. By placing workloads in the most appropriate locations, enterprises can better rebalance and optimize operations to improve a series of efficiencies, minimize costs, heighten security and achieve better business results.  

Flexential continues to introduce new enhancements and features to its HPC – Advanced Access tool. Stay tuned to our follow-up blog for information on how HPC – Advanced Access offers visibility into the cloud to help you better manage your cloud environments.