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Using offline migration

With offline migration, Migrate for Compute Engine enables you to migrate workloads running on vSphere with operating systems that are not currently supported by Migrate for Compute Engine's streaming technology.

During the offline migration process, all storage migrates to the cloud first, and then the VM starts.

Another use case for offline migration is storage-only migration for VMs that aren't supported by the cloud provider. These are typically VMs with older operating systems, for example Red Hat 4. With storage-only migration, you can migrate volumes and then reattach them to a VM with a supported OS.

Preparing a VM for offline migration

The following steps show how to prepare different operating systems for offline migration.

Ubuntu 12.x

Edit /etc/network/interfaces and change the primary interface name to eth0 and set it to DHCP:

# The primary network interface

    auto eth0
    iface eth0 inet dhcp

Windows 2008 non-R2 to Google Cloud

No preparation is necessary for offline migration of Windows Server 2008 64-bit.

Windows Server 2008 32-bit requires package installation before starting offline migration.

To install them:

Download the (driver package)
Unzip devcon.zip to a directory of your choice.

Download an additional driver package to that same directory:

gsutil cp gs://gce-windows-drivers-public/win2k3driver/x86/* [DIRECTORY]

Run the install.cmd script from that directory
Run an offline migration

Windows 2003 SP2 to Google Cloud

No preparation is necessary for offline migration of Windows Server 2003.

On-premises to cloud: Offline migration process

Before you begin, perform the offline preparation as explained in the previous sections. Then perform the following steps:

In the vSphere Web Client, select the virtual machine.
Right-click the VM and select Velostrata Operations > Offline Migrate.
Select the Velostrata Cloud Extension and click Next.
Select the Instance Type (VM size) and click Next.
Select the required Security Groups and click Next.
Select a Subnet in Google Cloud. When Cloud Extension nodes are in different zones, Migrate for Compute Engine uses the node in the same zone as the selected subnet. Otherwise, you need to select the node manually.
From the Configure Private IP drop-down list:
- Select Auto to automatically assign an IP address on the subnet, or
- Select Static and enter the desired static IP address. From the Edge Node drop-down list, select the required node and click Next.
Select the Storage Type and click Next.
Review the summary and then click Finish.

To view the related migration tasks, use the Monitor > Tasks & Events tab.

After the offline migration, you can connect to the VM using its private IP address or FQDN.

AWS to Google Cloud: Offline migration process

Offline migrations using Waves

To perform offline migration from AWS to Google Cloud, run an offline migration job on a Wave.

Offline migrations using PowerShell

To perform offline migration on a single VM from AWS, run the following command from PowerShell, filling in your AWS EC2 InstanceID and Cloud Extension name:


Invoke-VelosOfflineMigration [-Id] InstanceID -CloudExtension $ [-EdgeNode ]-StorageSpec  -InstanceType  -CloudDetailsName

For example:


Invoke-VelosOfflineMigration -Id i-04151a4a1067cfe9b -CloudExtension $gcpCe -EdgeNode NodeA -StorageSpec Standard -InstanceType n1-standard-1 -CloudDetailsName aws