Organizations are constantly looking for a solution/technology that can provide greater efficiency for their IT Environment along with cost savings, to protect their data against all contingencies. The complete responsibility to maintain and manage the IT infrastructure of an organization lies in the hands of their IT teams. These people need to stay up-to-date about the latest technology trends to ensure business continuity for high uptime and productivity.
Data migration is one of the efficient IT strategies and is performed to meet the resource demands, to cut costs and to move data to the more reliable environment, but admins face many challenges while implementing as the IT environment is heterogeneous. This article provides an insight into the difficulties while migrating data and how to overcome them.
Challenges faced by IT admins during Data Migration
Moving data from Physical to Virtual Environment (P2V migration)
Data lies entirely in two different environments and hence migrating from physical to virtual is a daunting task. The P2V migration process decouples the OS and its applications from the physical hardware and migrates it to a guest machine on a virtualization platform.
Moving data from one hypervisor to another hypervisor (V2V migration)
IT admins will choose hypervisors based on their advantages and compatibility. Sometimes, based on the requirements, multi-hypervisors are also deployed for data center operations. In such a scenario, the IT admins will need a special tool called V2V converter to achieve cross-hypervisor migration.
Moving data from Virtual/Physical to Physical Environment (V2P & P2P migration)
Migrating an existing physical or virtual machine into a physical machine is referred to as bare-metal restore. It requires a lot of manual labor and is a tedious and uncertain process, especially if the new physical environment contains substantially different hardware than the old.
Thus, the companies require certain software tools to handle these migration challenges. But implementing different tools for conversion can be difficult as well as prohibitively expensive. To make the IT administrator’s work easier, a single cost-effective software is required that can satisfy the cross-platform migration process across multiple hypervisors, or across different workloads (P/V).
Cross-Platform Migration – Vembu BDR Suite
Data Migration involves a lot of data risks. Migration tools are mostly not reliable since data can’t be recovered if there is any inconsistency during migration. Thus, it is recommended to choose and invest in a single solution that can address all types of migrations (P2V, V2V, V2P) as well as that can protect your data.
Vembu BDR Suite is a universal backup solution that caters to the backup and disaster recovery needs of diverse IT environments (Physical/Virtual/Cloud). One of the key differentiators of this suite is that it supports cross-platform data migration. Vembu protects your data and lets you perform all types of Migrations like P2V, V2V, V2P.
Vembu has an efficient in-house file system called VembuHIVE which is the foundation of all the functionality that Vembu BDR provides, including data migrations. Vembu lets you download the backup data in any of the formats like VHD, VMDK, Flat.VMDK, VHDX and RAW through the Recovery option called Download. These virtual file formats help in performing different migration processes.
Scenario: P2V Migration using Vembu BDR Suite
Using Vembu BDR Suite, you can configure Image-level backup for your Physical machine (Windows Server/Workstations)
Windows Server machine backup can be configured in 5 Simple Steps. To start, Install Vembu BDR Suite and open the console.
- Choose Backup and select Microsoft Windows
- Enter the IP address and Administrative Credentials (Username & Password) of the machine
- Click backup and choose the Disks/Drives for backup
- Set the Scheduling Policies and Retention policies. If required, you can enable Additional Full backup and Encryption options
- Review all the configurations and Save the Backup job
The Physical machine backup data is saved in the Vembu BDR server storage. Now, to perform the P2V migration, click on the recovery tab and click Restore.
There are various recovery options. To permanently migrate and restore your physical machine as a Virtual Machine, click on the Download option. This lets you download the Physical machine data in Virtual File format to perform the P2V migration.
Example: If you want to migrate your physical machine to Hyper-V environment, then choose VHD (Generation-1 VM) or VHDX (Generation-2 VM) format and perform restore. Create a VM on Hyper-V using the obtained virtual file format.
Apart from Cross-Platform Migration Support, Vembu also provides several business continuity features like Quick VM recovery on VMware, Hyper-V, KVM, Instant Recovery of Files/Folders & granular recovery of MS-Apps and Disk Management Mount. Also, Vembu lets you experience the 3-2-1 best backup strategy – 3 copies of backup data, 2 in different media (Disk/Tape) and 1 in offsite location (local/cloud).
Vembu BDR Suite provides migration tools as part of backup and disaster recovery solution, hence users can experience easy data migration across any environment. Thus, Vembu helps you to achieve business continuity and provides high availability for your data through its cross-platform migration feature.
Experience modern data protection with this latest Vembu BDR Suite v.3.9.0 FREE edition. Try the 30 days free trial here: https://www.bdrsuite.com/vembu-bdr-suite-download/
Got questions? Email us at: vembu-support@vembu.com for answers.
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