Running and migrating VMs

This page describes how to use the Migrate for Compute Engine vCenter plugin to start running or migrating individual VMs to Compute Engine. For more on the distinction between running and migrating, see Running VMs versus migrating VMs.

Prerequisites

Before running or migrating any on-premises VMs on Compute Engine, make sure you've set up the prequisites described in the overview.

Running a VM in Compute Engine or starting a migration

1. From the vSphere Web Client, select the desired Virtual Machine.

2. Right-click that VM, then select one of the following:

   1. To run the VM on Compute Engine, select Migrate for Google Compute Engine Operations > Run-in-Cloud
   2. To migrate the VM, select Migrate for Google Compute Engine > Migrate

3. Select your Cloud Extension.

4. (Optional) Name the Cloud VM.

5. Click Next. The Cloud Instance screen appears.

   

6. Select the Project and Instance Type.

   Migrate for Compute Engine suggests instance sizes that approximate the capacity and performance of the existing VM. For information on how recommendations are processed, see Cloud Instance Rightsizing.

   Note: The prices shown are for compute costs only and do not include disk and network costs, which vary. For more information, see Compute Engine Pricing.

7. Click Next. The Storage Policy screen appears.

8. For the Storage Policy, select one of the following:

   • Write Back to write storage data changes made on Compute Engine back on-premises.
   • Write Isolation to not write storage data changes back on-premises while the VM is running on Compute Engine.

   For more on storage policies, see Understanding and changing storage policies.

9. Click Next. The Networking screen appears.

   

10. Select the Subnet on Google Cloud for the VM.

11. Enter any Network Tags (comma separated) which will be applied to the migrated VM.

12. (Optional) Select the Instance Service Account .

13. From the Configure Private IP drop-down list, select one of the following:

    • Auto to automatically assign an available address from the subnet, or
    • Static and enter a Static IP within the VPC subnet.

14. From the Edge Node drop-down list, select the primary node in your Cloud Extension that will handle the migration.

15. For External IP, select:

    • None, to not assign an external IP address.
    • Ephemeral, for an automatically assigned external IP.
    • Static, to assign an external IP previously created on the Google Cloud console.
    Note: the External IP setting persists after the VM has been detached from Migrate for Compute Engine. External IP addresses are visible in the Public IP Address field in the Migrate for Compute Engine Cloud Extension portlet on vSphere.

16. Click Next.

17. If you are performing a migrate operation:

    • Select the Disk Type for your instance and Service Account that hosts the worker instance handling the migration.
    • Click Next. The Summary screen appears.

18. Review the summary, and then click Finish.

You can view the progress of running the VM and then migrating the VM on the Cloud Instance Information portlet on the VM Summary page, and by monitoring the created vSphere task.

After running a VM in Compute Engine

You can connect to the VM when the Remote Console field in the Cloud Instance Information portlet turns green and reads Ready.

For more information about monitoring your VMs, see Monitoring overview.

Note: When you run a VM on Compute Engine and the instance responds to a probe (a connection response to either port 22 or 3389), Migrate for Compute Engine attempts to fix the problem and restart the instance. If this doesn't succeed, Migrate for Compute Engine rolls back the run-in-cloud task.

After migrating a VM to Compute Engine

Storage migrations take several hours. When the Migration Wizard is completed, the VM is ready to detach. To continue, see Detaching a VM.