Migrating on-premises storage

When a VM is "Run-in-Cloud", Migrate for Compute Engine's caching technology predicts and streams storage as needed. Migrating storage makes the VM independent of its source. You can start full-storage migration at any point, even before launching the VM on Google Cloud.

Migrating storage also allows you to launch additional VMs from the source image. For example, an additional VM may be desired for redundancy or better network performance.

VM writes replicate back on-premises if the original storage policy is set to write-back.

The time required for a full migration varies depending on the amount of data and available bandwidth.

Migrate on-premises source VM storage to the cloud

  1. On the vSphere Web Client, select the desired VM.
  2. If the VM is still running on-premises, follow the steps in Running the Migration Wizard.

    At this point, you can either:

    1. Right-click the VM and select Migrate for Compute Engine Operations > Migration Operations > Start Storage Migration, or
    2. Click the Summary tab, and expand the Cloud Instance Information panel. In the Storage Migration row, click on the green arrow and select Migrate VM storage to Cloud. You can also pause migrations from this screen.

When storage migration is complete, the VM is shown to be Fully Cached. In this state, all the VM's disks are stored in a Cloud Storage bucket and are accessible by your Cloud Extension (CE).

Viewing a Migration Throughput Graph

On the VSphere Web Client, select the desired Datacenter that hosts the cloud extension. In the Monitor tab, select the Velostrata Service tab, choose the specific cloud extension and the time range to view the graph.