When Xtract for VMs launched just seven months ago, it provided Nutanix customers with a simple and granular method to onboard existing workloads to on-premises Nutanix Enterprise Clouds. The ease and speed in which migrations are completed reduces the time taken to onboard workloads, providing customers with a short time-to-value. This has resulted in great customer adoption with Xtract being used by hundreds of organizations to migrate in excess of 12,000 VMs, based on a variety of Microsoft Windows and Linux operating systems.
Today we proudly announce the next phase of Xtract’s application mobility story, enabling VM migrations from public cloud, available in a future release.
Introducing AWS cloud migrations
With the next release of Xtract, Nutanix adds Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a source for VM migrations from the public cloud to an on-premises Nutanix Enterprise Cloud.
Why introduce AWS VM migrations
To build or rent is a question all organizations ask themselves, and even when it appears easier and cheaper to rent infrastructure, a public cloud first strategy can prove both time consuming and costly when business priorities change and there is need to migrate VMs elsewhere, to another public cloud or on-premises infrastructure.
Examples of organizations that chose to migrate from public cloud deployments are not difficult to come by, and include names such as Facebook and Dropbox, however similar migration challenges exist regardless of organizational size. Recent high profile public cloud outages and latency issues only add to organizational fears over security and compliance.
Nutanix believes organizations should have freedom to manage hybrid cloud complexity with ease, without lock-in or spiraling costs.
How to manage AWS VM migrations: a guide
Xtract for VMs has been designed to simply add the AWS VM migration feature as a new source for VM migrations, adding to VMware ESXi used for on-premises migrations to AHV. Architecting Xtract in this manner means that the migration processes remains the same as it did before.
Adding an AWS connection source is very simple, requiring only an appropriate friendly name, your AWS access key ID, and AWS secret access key.
Once connected to your AWS account, the number of available regions and VMs contained in those regions is visible.
The process for creating a migration plan from AWS is now the same, requiring the same few steps as for other on-premises migration plans, including VM(s) selection.
The network mapping from the source to target occurs in the same manner as for on-premises migrations, and then within a few clicks, the migration plan is complete and can be executed.
Once a migration plan is executed, the initial data-seeding starts, taking as long as necessary depending on the volume of data and connection speeds. This process doesn’t impact the source VM which remains up and running.
Once all migrated VMs have been synchronized, they remain in-sync with periodic delta updates until such time you choose to cutover to the new target VM. Control of the cutover process is a key feature of Xtract enabling businesses to choose when is most appropriate to cutover, and helping to minimize any VM outage.
Nutanix testing has shown t2.micro instances to take as little as twenty minutes to complete, with the cutover being as short as one minute.
Can I migrate all workloads?
One of the more difficult aspects of public cloud migrations are the dependencies formed to cloud-native services. As such, for this initial release, standalone EC2 instances with attached EBS volumes are supported.
When can I start migrating AWS VMs to Nutanix Enterprise Cloud?
Nutanix is announcing this new public cloud VM migration feature just as the Xtract product team is preparing for an early access release, and we are looking for a small number of customers willing to participate in it. If you have an AWS public cloud presence and are willing to participate in an initial 30-60 minute exploratory call to discuss your requirements, please email xtractfromaws@nutanix.com.
Learn more about Nutanix Xtract at www.nutanix.com/products/move, and join in with the community discussion here.
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