What Is VMware Modernization?
What is VMware modernization?
VMware modernization migrates your legacy VMware instances, workloads, and applications to the cloud. Many organizations have existing VMware virtualization solutions in their on-premise environments or data centers. Modernizing VMware workloads and infrastructure by migrating to the cloud can help with cost optimization, improve scalability, and integration with modern services. There are several approaches to VMware modernization, including rehosting, replatforming, refactoring, and containerization.
What is VMware modernization?
VMware modernization is the process of migrating VMware workloads to the cloud.
What is VMware?
VMware is a software company that develops and commercializes virtualization technologies. VMware software allows you to create multiple virtualized environments on a single physical computer. The VMware software allows you to run multiple operating systems and applications concurrently in these virtual machines (VMs).
A type of software known as the hypervisor oversees the distribution of resources to each virtual machine, making it the bridge between the VMs and the underlying physical hardware of the computer.
VMware offers a suite of virtualized environment software, designated by specific product lines. For example, VMware vSphere is an environment that hosts multiple virtual servers at once (like a Windows server and a Linux server concurrently). VMware ESXi is the hypervisor that pools and distributes resources to allow these environments to exist on the same machine at the same time.
VMware workloads often include large enterprise software solutions like SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), email servers, web servers, and large-scale financial databases (like MS SQL servers).
Why choose modernization?
Many organizations still host their VMware virtualized environments on on-premises infrastructure (or in data centers). VMware modernization involves VMware migration to the cloud. Modernization of VMware to AWS cloud environments can enhance operational speed and efficiency while reducing overheads and resourcing requirements.
What are the benefits of VMware modernization?
There are several benefits of VMware modernization for businesses.
End-of-life upgrade
Businesses may be using VMware environments that operate on deprecated versions of ESXi or vSphere. Without proper support, these deprecated environments pose security risks or bottleneck performance. Modernizing infrastructure overcomes these potential issues, allowing you to improve performance and enhance support by moving to public cloud platforms.
Cloud migration scalability
Legacy VMware environments are limited by the physical infrastructure that your organization owns. VMware modernization overcomes this issue by providing direct access to scalable cloud resources by moving away from hardware-based legacy systems.
With access to a broad range of instance sizes and types, you can tailor your usage of storage, compute, and networking resources from your cloud provider. With cloud resourcing and elastic services, you can scale resources based on your workload demands.
Cost benefits
VMware modernization allows your business to eliminate the cost of maintaining your own physical servers. For example, migrating your self-hosted VMware to EC2 cloud instances means you no longer need to factor in physical hardware maintenance into your costs. Migration can also help save on VMware licensing costs, depending on your migration approach.
Cloud infrastructure integration
By migrating your VMware environments to the cloud, you can also take advantage of the benefits offered by your cloud provider. These benefits can include managed infrastructure, default encryption, and configurable compliance guardrails.
Modernizing your IT foundation into the cloud allows you to integrate with other cloud-native services, such as advanced analytics, ML, and generative AI tools that enhance and drive digital innovation.
Compliance
VMware modernization brings your organization onto the cloud, allowing automated compliance with regulatory frameworks through built-in compliance capabilities.
Using tools like AWS CloudTrail simplifies operational auditing, governance, and compliance. This cloud-first approach with compliance tools helps to meet regulatory standards and audit your organization.
What are the approaches to migrating VMware-based workloads?
There are several approaches to the VMware migration process that will depend on your organization’s virtualization strategy, business objectives, and existing workloads. You may require more than one approach, depending on your existing VMware environments.
The migration approaches are listed below.
Rehosting
Rehosting, also known as lift-and-shift migration, is the least disruptive method of modernizing VMware workloads. This approach involves migrating your existing VMs directly to your cloud provider’s infrastructure.
For example, AWS Elastic VMware Service (Amazon EVS) allows you to run VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) within your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). By rehosting, you can continue to use the same VCF licenses, existing hypervisors, and applications without having to reconfigure your product.
Rehosting is a seamless approach to VMware modernization that helps organizations to gain access to cloud services while minimizing potential disruptions involved in rebuilding critical applications.
Replatforming
Replatforming VMware is the process of changing VMware-based workloads to cloud-native services, removing VMware as the base product. Replatforming ensures that the workload can utilize scalable cloud resources and additional cloud-native services that the cloud provider offers.
The specific platform you’ll migrate to depends on the workloads or functions of your VMs. For example, you can replatform relational databases to Amazon Relational Database Services (RDS), while a VM that stores objects can be replatformed to Amazon S3.
This approach to VMware modernization means assessing individual workloads and their corresponding cloud services.
Refactoring
Refactoring is a more complex and resource-demanding form of VMware migration that involves rewriting legacy applications. Refactoring is required when applications running on your VMware environments have been designed specifically for the underlying operating system or hardware.
Legacy applications running on older operating systems and hardware on VMware may need complex refactoring, including changing the underlying programming language or breaking an application up into microservices. Applications can be rewritten as cloud-native applications.
Due to the costs involved in refactoring, organizations only choose this approach when it’s considered a business modernization necessity.
Containerization
Containerization is a migration strategy that breaks down existing components or applications into container-based microservices. Depending on the current configuration of these services, the containerization process may involve a degree of refactoring.
How can AWS support your VMware modernization journey?
AWS offers a wide range of migration tools, guidance, services, and programs to accelerate your VMware migration and modernization journey to the cloud with AWS.
AWS Application Migration Service simplifies, expedites, and reduces the cost of migrating and modernizing applications. Move your VMware applications to AWS with this tool, which walks you through each step of the migration.
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) allows you to migrate from VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid with ease, providing fully managed services and a secure and scalable Kubernetes solution that includes hybrid cloud. Amazon EKS automates Kubernetes cluster infrastructure management, such as scheduling containers, managing application availability, dynamically scaling resources, optimizing compute, and storing cluster data.
Amazon Elastic VMware Service (Amazon EVS) allows you to run VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) directly within your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). With Amazon EVS, you experience the scale, resilience, and performance of AWS while keeping your familiar VCF software and skills.
AWS Transform for VMware automates application discovery and dependency mapping, network translation, wave planning, and server migration, optimizing Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. AWS Transform is the first agentic AI service for modernizing VMware workloads and saving on licensing costs.
Get started with VMware modernization on your cloud migration journey on AWS by creating a free account today.
Browse all cloud computing concepts
Browse all cloud computing concepts content here:
Did you find what you were looking for today?
Let us know so we can improve the quality of the content on our pages