Configuring a processing cluster on Google Cloud for Windows workloads

Important: The Migrate to Containers UI in the Google Cloud console, migctl, and CRDs that use processing clusters to migrate workloads to Google Cloud are now deprecated. They are supported for existing users until May 2024, after which they will no longer be available. If you're new to Migrate to Containers, then use the Migrate to Containers CLI to perform migrations on your local machine. For more information, see Migrate to Containers CLI architecture.

This topic describes how to set up Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) or GKE Enterprise cluster on Google Cloud for migrating Windows IIS applications. You'll use the processing cluster to generate migrated container artifacts, operate and monitor the migration.

Note: You must use Migrate to Containers 1.7.5 or later to migrate Windows workloads. If you are currently using a version earlier than 1.7.5, see the Release Notes for information on upgrading your environment to support migrating Windows workloads.

Before you begin

Before creating a processing cluster, you'll need:

• A user with GKE Administrator privileges. These privileges are only necessary for the setup portion.

• Prerequisites for migration. See Prerequisites for migrating Windows IIS Application using Google Cloud processing clusters for more.

  Note: You will need to use the same VPC for your Migrate to Virtual Machines infrastructure and your GKE clusters.

• Configured your environment as described in Enabling Google services and configuring service accounts.

Set your project defaults

Before you start, make sure you have performed the following tasks:

• Enable the Google Kubernetes Engine API.
Enable Google Kubernetes Engine API
• If you want to use the Google Cloud CLI for this task, install and then initialize the gcloud CLI. If you previously installed the gcloud CLI, get the latest version by running gcloud components update.
  Note: For existing gcloud CLI installations, make sure to set the compute/region and compute/zone properties. By setting default locations, you can avoid errors in gcloud CLI like the following: One of [--zone, --region] must be supplied: Please specify location.

Create a cluster for Windows workloads

Use the gcloud container command to create a cluster and the necessary node pool. See the command documentation for other flags you might want to use.

Your cluster must:

• Be located on Google Cloud. Google Distributed Cloud Virtual for Bare Metal are not supported for Windows migrations.
  • If you are using GKE versions earlier than 1.18.10-gke.2100 or 1.19.3-gke.2100, we recommend that you enable the Compute Engine persistent disk CSI Driver and make standard-rwo the default StorageClass on your cluster.
• Specify cloud-platform for the --scopes value.
• Specify --enable-ip-alias to makes the cluster VPC-native.
• Use any operating system, such as Container-Optimized OS or Ubuntu.

• Contain a Windows node pool used to process the migration with an image-type set to WINDOWS_LTSC.

  Note: As of Migrate to Containers version 1.7.5, you must use an image-type of WINDOWS_LTSC. In previous releases, you could use an image-type of WINDOWS_SAC. WINDOWS_SAC is no longer supported.

Creating a cluster using Windows Server node pools includes additional information you might find useful for creating clusters to run node pools running Windows Server.

About clusters for Compute Engine sources

A migration source represents the source platform from which you'll be migrating. For example, VMware or Compute Engine are all types of source platforms. As part of the migration, Migrate to Containers creates a snapshot of the disk images from a VM running on the source platform.

When the source platform is Compute Engine, you can only snapshot a specific disk at most once every 10 minutes, or 6 times an hour. To avoid hitting this limit, we recommend that you create the cluster in the same zone as the Compute Engine VM. When the cluster is in the same zone as the VM, Migrate to Containers can clone the disk, rather than create a snapshot, which is a more efficient process and bypasses the snapshot limit.

See Creating frequent snapshots efficiently for more on the limit.

Creating the cluster

The example below creates a simple processing cluster that can get you started using Migrate to Containers. To learn more about the different ways you can configure your cluster, see About cluster configuration choices.

For more advanced networking configuration options, see:

• Creating a cluster on a shared VPC
• Creating a private cluster

The gcloud command offers many configuration options that you might want to set. These include choosing node machine types, specifying the --network and --subnetwork, and enabling Alias IP addresses. See gcloud container clusters create for more information.

1. Create the cluster:

   gcloud container clusters create cluster-name \
    --project project-name \
    --zone=gcp-zone \
    --enable-ip-alias \
    --num-nodes=1 \
    --machine-type=e2-standard-4 \
    --cluster-version=version-number \
    --network network \
    --subnetwork subnetwork
   

   Note: When the source platform is Compute Engine, we recommend that you set gcp-zone to the same zone hosting the Compute Engine VM.

   Edit the parameters in the command examples to match your own needs. For example, set project to the name of your Google Cloud project and set zone to your compute zone.

   We requires a machine-type of "e2-standard-2" or larger.

2. Create the Windows node pool used to process the migration:

   gcloud container node-pools create node-pool-name \
    --cluster=cluster-name \
    --image-type=WINDOWS_LTSC_CONTAINERD \
    --zone=gcp-zone \
    --num-nodes=1 \
    --scopes "cloud-platform" \
    --machine-type=e2-standard-4
   

   Note: If you use the Google Cloud console to create the cluster, be sure to select Allow full access to all Cloud APIs under default-pool > Security. This setting corresponds to the --scopes "cloud-platform" setting in the gcloud command.

3. Connect to the cluster:

   gcloud container clusters get-credentials cluster-name \
    --zone gcp-zone --project project-name
   

Creating a cluster on a shared VPC

A common environment creates clusters with a Shared VPC. With Shared VPC, you designate one project as the host project, and you can attach other projects, called service projects, to the host project.

To learn how to create a cluster on a shared VPC, see Setting up clusters with Shared VPC.

Creating a private cluster

Private clusters give you the ability to isolate nodes from having inbound and outbound connectivity to the public internet. This isolation is achieved as the nodes have internal IP addresses only.

Migrate to Containers supports the use of private clusters. However, when using a private cluster, the control plane node must be able to reach the Migrate to Containers infrastructure pod on port 9443.

Therefore, you must add port 9443 to the firewall rules of the control plane node. For more, see Creating a private cluster.

What's next

• Learn about installing Migrate to Containers.