Migrate for Compute Engine supports moving VMs to Compute Engine sole-tenant nodes. With sole-tenant nodes, Compute Engine ensures your VMs don't share a host with another customer's workloads. For more information about sole-tenant nodes, see the Compute Engine documentation.
Additionally, sole-tenant nodes can host Windows VMs under licenses that you already hold (Bring Your Own License, or BYOL).
About node affinity
Node affinity determines which nodes your VMs use as hosts. Node affinity, keys, and values are described in detail in the Compute Engine documentation.
Node affinity keys and values must be configured in Compute Engine before using them in Migrate for Compute Engine.
To use node affinity in your migration, configure the keys and values in your
runbook. Each affinity label key is configured by using a column named
SoleTenancy-NodeAffinity:[KEY]
.
To allow a VM to be migrated to
a sole-tenant node that matches multiple keys (for example, workload
and layer
),
add multiple columns, each with a different key.
To allow a VM to be migrated to a sole-tenant
node that matches at least one value or key, place them in the same column
or row value and separate them with a |
.
In the example below, a sole-tenancy affinity label with a key of workload
has possible values of dev
, staging
, and prod
. There are two VMs,
app-prod
and app-test
. The app-prod
VM must run on the nodes tagged with
the prod
key, but the app-test
VM can run on nodes tagged with either
staging
or dev
keys.
Name | SoleTenancy-NodeAffinity:workload |
---|---|
app-prod | prod |
app-test | dev|staging |
Prerequisites
Before you migrate to sole-tenant nodes using Migrate for Compute Engine, set up your node configuration on Compute Engine.
- Create sole-tenant node groups and instances in the target project for where your workloads will run.
- Configure node affinity or anti-affinity labels.
Create VMs on sole-tenant nodes
Migrate for Compute Engine supports launching sole-tenant nodes with BYOL using waves. VMs launched on sole-tenant nodes are configured from your runbook. For more on runbook fields, including these, see Runbook reference.
To run VMs on sole-tenant nodes:
- In your runbook, add the following columns and set their values for each
VM you want to migrate to a
sole-tenant host:
Field Required Format Notes SoleTenancy-NodeAffinity:[KEY]
Yes. String Node affinity groups that the VM can be launched in. For more information, see About node affinity in this topic. SoleTenancy-NodeAffinityNot:[KEY]
No. String Node affinity groups that the node cannot be launched in. Multiple groups must be separated by a |
character.SoleTenancy-VmHostMaintenancePolicy
No. migrate
(default) orterminate
SoleTenancy-RestartOnFailure
No. true
(default) orfalse
- Continue with your wave migration.
Bring Your Own License for Windows
Sole-tenancy additionally supports Bring Your Own License (BYOL) for Windows VMs. For more on runbook fields, including these, see Runbook reference.
To migrate VMs with BYOL and sole-tenancy:
- Verify that you created your sole-tenant node with the
--restart-node-on-minimal-servers
flag. In your runbook, create columns for the following fields:
Field Required Format Notes OSLicense
Yes. String A supported Windows BYOL license string. You can find supported license strings in the Windows BYOL documentation. SoleTenancy-NodeAffinity:[KEY]
Yes String Node affinity groups that the VM can be launched in. See About node affinity for more information. SoleTenancy-NodeAffinityNot:[KEY]
No. String Node affinity groups that the node cannot be launched in. SoleTenancy-VmHostMaintenancePolicy
No. terminate
The maintenance policy of your sole-tenant node group. To choose a maintenance policy that best suits your sole-tenant node group, see Host maintenance policy. SoleTenancy-RestartOnFailure
No. true
(default) orfalse
Continue with the wave migration.
Suggested configurations for sole-tenant nodes with different licenses
Looking to migrate to sole-tenant nodes? Here is a table that can help you decide which configuration options are right for you.
License Scenario | Windows Server BYOL | MS SQL BYOL | Windows PAYG Or Linux (BYOL/PAYG) Sole-tenancy with resource pool |
|
---|---|---|---|---|
License Type | Per Core License | Per Core License | With Software Assurance or Nodes in the group are licensed in advance Using a resource pool |
|
Sole-tenant nodes settings in Compute Engine | ||||
Sole Tenant Node Property - --restart-node-on-minimal-servers | Yes | Yes | No | No |
Individual VM settings in your runbook | ||||
VM Property - Affinity Labels | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
VM Property - Host Maintenance Policy | Terminate | Terminate | Migrate | Migrate |
VM Property - Restart on failure | Yes / No | Yes / No | Yes / No | Yes / No |
VM Property - Windows OS license Licenses can be found at the Compute Engine documentation. |
BYOL | BYOL/PAYG | PAYG | Windows PAYG or Linux |