AWS Service Moves Virtual Workloads To the Cloud Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS), launched this week a new service that allows organizations to migrate their on-premises workloads into the cloud with minimal downtime. Customers in the Sydney, Northern Virginia, and Ireland regions can now access the AWS Server Migration Service (SMS). According to the company, it’s designed to allow organizations to migrate their virtual infrastructures into AWS Elastic Compute Cloud. (EC2) without any disruption or maintenance. In a Monday blog post, Jeff Barr, AWS evangelist, stated that this service “simplifies and streamlines the process for migrating existing virtualized apps to Amazon EC2”. It allows you to incrementally copy live Virtual Machines (VMs), to the cloud without the need to have a long maintenance period. Automate, schedule, track, and automate incremental replication of live server volumes. This simplifies the process of coordinating large-scale migrations that span hundreds or even thousands of volumes. Barr explained that SMS creates an Amazon Machine Image (AMI), for each server volume it replicates. Before the migration is completed, users can test each AMI. Customers must download the AWS Server Migration Service Connector to use SMS. This connector “runs in your existing virtualized environment and allows the migration itself, in an agentless fashion,” according Barr. After downloading the Connectors users can access SMS via their AWS Management console. There users can select which servers to replicate, set replication frequency, and monitor current migration jobs. AWS documentation states that SMS is limited to these:

- October 28, 2022 - Janice

“50 concurrent VM migrations per account
“90 days of service usage per virtual machine (not per account), starting with the initial replication of a virtual machine. Unless a customer requests an increase in the limit, we will terminate an ongoing replication after 90-days.

SMS is free to use. Customers pay for the amount of Amazon S3 storage that their replications consume. AWS’ announcement comes less than two weeks after it inked a deal with virtualization giant VMware that included, among other things, support for easier virtualized-application migrations.