May Be Easier Than You Think
Many companies are migrating their workloads to AWS as-is to take advantage of the capabilities of the cloud. Moving your existing workload allows you retire aging hardware that is prone to failures.
Microsoft Windows is typically supported for ~10 years meaning the hardware is due for a refresh before having to go through the process of reinstalling and migration the applications.
AWS has a variety of tools and automation to move an on-premise workload to AWS. One of the most common tools is AWS Server Migration Service. There are no additional fees to use AWS SMS. You pay the standard fees for the S3 buckets, EBS volumes, and data transfer used during the migration process, and for the EC2 instances that you run.
From a high-level, here are the steps.
1. Create AWS account and setup with best practices
2. Create VPC, subnets and any additional networking. For this step, using a CloudFormation Template saves a lot of time.
3. Review SMS requirements and create the necessary permissions. For this step, again a CloudFormation Template will save more time.
4. Setup the SMS appliance on VMware or Hyper-V
5. Create a replication job and monitor the progress. For Windows instances, you can choose to bring your own licenses or use pay-as-you go through AWS.
6. One the job is finished; you can create new instances with the AMIs generated with SMS. This is typically done twice, once to test and a second time after a final sync is complete during the cutover window.
AWS SMS allows you to migrate your existing on-premise workloads to AWS with little to no down time. CloudFormation allows you to automate some of the steps to eliminate mistakes and quickly deploy the basic resources.
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Innovative Solutions is an Advanced Consulting Partner with expertise in Microsoft Workloads. Innovative is a service delivery partner for Windows on EC2 and part of the Service Delivery Program.
