How do you migrate a virtualised environment to Public cloud?

Today most enterprises (small or large) use some form of virtualization in their private IT infrastructure. In many cases they have invested significant time and money into this environment in the hope that they have better control over their IT estate especially to implement features like live-migration, auto restart after hardware failure, hardware maintenance without downtime, accelerate application development etc. Equally, they now also want to avail of the core benefits of public cloud, e.g. consolidation, agility, cost reduction.

If you already have large virtualised environments, migration to public cloud could be a complicated exercise as applications often use many virtual machines (VMs) with disparate software and pre-defined connections; which is sometimes not worth the resulting benefits.

So, how do you migrate a virtualised environment to Public cloud?

Ideally each virtual machine is migrated individually, and then re-connected to cloud cluster one by one, which could be a time-consuming and complex exercise.

Imagine if you could move the entire cluster including VM connections to migrate en masse resulting in simpler faster migration.

In order to explain this let’s understand the basic underlying technologies:

Virtualization on the x86 Architecture

In this architecture, the job of the hypervisor is to provide the illusion that guest operating systems running below it are running on their own hardware while in fact they are not. The hardware is shared with the hypervisor itself, and any other virtual machines running on the same host.

Ravello HVX: High performance nested virtualization

In this architecture, an integral part of HVX is a high performance nested hypervisor or Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) capable of running unmodified guests on top of already virtualized hardware.

Conventional hypervisors are designed to run on physical x86 hardware and use virtualization extensions offered by modern CPUs (Intel VT and AMD SVM) to virtualize the Intel architecture. HVX, on the other hand is a nested hypervisor that runs inside a virtual machine, where these hardware extensions are not normally available. Instead, HVX employs a technology called Binary Translation to implement high-performance virtualization that does not require these virtualization extensions.

Also, enterprises are used to the concept of being able to take a snapshot of a single virtual machine running on top of any conventional hypervisor. Ravello extends that concept and allows enterprises to take a snapshot or a blueprint of an entire application environment running on top of Ravello. The state of the disks, memory, network as well as topology meta data is saved as a “blueprint” - which then allows enterprises to spin up as many isolated copies of the environment as they need with the click of a button or a simple API call. The application environments created from a blueprint are identical - down to the same IP addresses, MAC addresses and other networking configuration. This makes it easy for each developer and test engineer to get their own copy of the environment, which helps accelerate and streamline the application development cycle.

Enjoy Migrating!