When considering our IT infrastructure, there is an efficiency scale we must look at. Is what we have in place the most efficient way of doing things? Are we going to see a drop in performance on our physical servers as the volume of requests increase?
As time goes you need to choose among the three:
- Upgrade your our old beaten down servers
- Crank up the processors
- Or virtualize them
Types of migrations:
Physical-to-virtual:
Virtualizing your physical machine has a lot of advantages, which also explains why there is a billion-dollar industry thriving on it. With VMs you are reducing the operating expenditure that goes into setting up hardware, power consumption, space, and maintenance. Hypervisors like VMware or Hyper-V are offering many features that enhance your visibility & control to drastically reducing system downtime by offering cluster deployments.
Physical-to-Physical (Bare Metal Restore) – Migrate system data from the old physical server to new hardware.
What is Virtual Machine Migration?
When you migrate a VM, you are copying all the VM data along with the configuration details to start a new VM in a different hypervisor. For this to happen, the copied VM image file should be in the required file format of the destination server. Migrating VMs can be to other hypervisors or to start as new physical machines (i.e.) V2V and V2P respectively.
Virtual-to-Virtual – Migrating machines across hypervisors like VMware to Hyper-V due to reasons of virtualization platform preference ranging from features to performance to pricing.
Virtual-to-Physical – Used mostly when you want to restore data(OS) from a VM than anything else.
Migration tools are available in varying degrees of automation, the least of which is the Manual process (of course). The migration process involves the following steps:
- Copying your OS
- Copying the data stored in the machine
- Copying the configuration data if the machine is a VM
- Reinstalling it in a defined virtual environment
Even if you are in abundance of time and no money in your budget for migration, this process is not recommended considering its tediousness.
A software for migration vs A software for backup, replication, recovery, DR and migration?
Vembu BDR Suite has an alternative solution for your migration plans (P2P, P2V, V2V or V2P). A backup solution that can protect all the data in your infrastructure and gives you the option to migrate your machines across platforms or hypervisors.
Backing up your data is a must, whether you are planning to migrate now or in the near future. By installing Vembu BDR Server and backing up your VMware/Hyper-V VMs with agentless backups in four simple steps, you now have backups that will recover your operations in any case of a failure while offering you the
Download option that will enable migration.
How to perform P2V, V2V, P2P migration with Vembu BDR Suite?
You can download the image of your backed up machines (VM or physical) in any of the following file-formats – VHD, VHDX, VMDK, Flat-VMDK and RAW. This is possible because of Vembu’s own file-system – VembuHIVE. By virtualizing the backup repository and storing the backup data in a neutral format, sharing and collaborating the files without recovering it is possible with VembuHIVE. It has built-in encryption, compression and deduplication to enhance storage optimization.
With the downloaded image file, you can start a new machine in any target server with the latest recovery point. Downloading the image file can be performed in three simple steps.
Taking the example of a backup of a physical machine, you will be looking at multiple recovery options that can handle different scenarios. Choose Download.
Choose the version of backup data you want to download (or migrate). All the restore points (Full and the incremental backups from Changed Block Tracking) will be listed. Choose the data (the disk) that you want to download. In the case of host-level backups, you will choose the VM that you want to restore.
The final step will be choosing the file format of your downloaded image and the restore location.
Taking the download file and starting a new machine is only step left.
By going for a backup and DR solution that can protect your machine’s critical data & applications, you will also be able to migrate your machines any time in the future.
Even our Free Edition offers all the basic backup and recovery (including Download) options to protect your IT infrastructure.
Experience modern data protection with the latest Vembu BDR Suite v4.0.
Try the 30 days free trial here:
Got questions? Email us at vembu-support@vembu.com for answers.
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