AWS has announced its Server Migration Service, which aims to make it easier for businesses to migrate virtualised applications to Amazon EC2.
Users can replicate live virtual machines to Amazon's cloud service without any downtime, making it a more reliable solution rather than having to take the virtual machines offline, for example.
"[Businesses] need to move their existing IT infrastructure to the AWS cloud without scheduling prolonged maintenance periods for data migration," Jeff Barr, chief evangelist at AWS said. "Because many of these applications are mission-critical and are heavily data-driven, taking systems offline in order to move gigabytes or terabytes of stored data is simply not practical."
AWS Server Migration Service allows businesses to automate, schedule, and track incremental replication of live server volumes. It comes in particularly useful for companies requiring a large-scale migration with tens or hundreds of volumes and AWS hopes it is becoming more relevant as organisations seek to transfer legacy applications to the cloud.
To use the migration tool, IT administrators simply need to install a connector that analyses the virtal server environments in operation, collecting the instances as it works.
This information can be viewed in the AWS Management Console, and it's from here that administrators can create and manage replication jobs that take the contents of the virtal machine and then convert it into an Amazon Machine Image.
When these images have been created (and administrators can schedule them to be created to minimise network usage), admins can spin up a new instance as a duplicate of the on-premise image, in the cloud.
AWS Server Migration Service is available now in AWS's US East (Northern Virginia), Europe (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Sydney) regions and it's free. The only cost is the fee you pay for using S3 storage used during the replication process and the EBS snapshots created after migration.
