Many long-term VMware customers are leaving the VMware ecosystem for Azure Stack HCI. They’ve decided that Microsoft’s hybrid cloud solution is the best choice for their organization in a post-VMware world.
But now that they’ve made that decision, they want to know how to migrate from VMware to Azure Stack HCI.
DataON and its partner Strategic Online Systems (SOS) have been using Veeam to help customers successfully migrate from VMware to Azure Stack HCI for years. The Veeam Data Platform is not just a backup solution, but also a powerful migration tool that gives customers the data freedom to backup and restore their VMs, applications, containers, and data across platforms on-premises and in the cloud. In fact, over 80% of our customers were already using Veeam as a backup solution before they made the decision to migrate to Microsoft.
Although many organizations are familiar with Veeam, if admins haven’t migrated VMs and data across platforms before, they need to be aware of how to create a strategy and avoid some of the most common dangers.
1/ Assess your VMware environment, VM configurations, and any dependencies you might have with other applications, and networks.
It’s important to back up all VMware VMs using the latest updated version of Veeam to safeguard against anything unforeseen before beginning a migration.
2/ Configure backup repositories on the new Azure Stack HCI hardware and configure the Azure Stack HCI network settings to match your VMware configuration.
It’s common to run into trouble, so it’s important to create a sandbox environment on an Azure Stack HCI cluster and perform a test migration first for each VM.
To begin the test migration, use Veeam to create backups of the VMs you plan to migrate from VMware to Azure Stack HCI. Then, use Veeam’s “Restore to Microsoft Hyper-V” option to migrate the backed-up VMs to Azure Stack HCI.
Even if the networking settings appear to be set correctly between Azure Stack HCI and VMware, you may face many different networking issues with jumbo packets, packet filtering, connection, or bottlenecks at the switch level when transferring from a legacy storage area network (SAN) or hyper-converged infrastructure to Azure Stack HCI. That’s why it’s important to catch these problems in a sandbox before attempting to migrate to a production cluster.
Be sure to factor in VM size and OS type into migration downtime calculations. Obviously, a smaller VM will take significantly less time to migrate than a larger one. Migrating a Windows VM is significantly faster than Linux. We recommend starting with no more than ten VMs at a time. Depending on size and VM operating system, the process with Veaam could take anywhere from as little as a few minutes to hours.
3/ Use Veeam tools to test the OS to ensure there is data integrity and the VMs work, and then repair them if they don’t.
Once you feel comfortable with the different types of VMs in your environments, we can work with you to determine configurations and tweaks to ensure they boot correctly in the new Azure Stack HCI environment. After a successful test migration, we can help you migrate the VMs out of the sandbox or directly from the VMware production to the Azure Stack HCI cluster during low usage times for minimal downtime.
4/ Monitor performance and stability of your migrated VMs
We recommend you continuously monitor the performance and stability of the newly migrated VMs and optimize them for the Azure Stack HCI production environment. This would include fine tuning resource allocations and network settings.
DataON, SOS, and Veeam and can help you avoid issues with your migration. Please contact us if you’d like to learn more about migrating from VMware to Azure Stack HCI.
Related video: Changing Hypervisors with Veeam: Demos and Expert Help