You are now viewing Migrate to Virtual Machines (formerly Migrate for Compute Engine). For Migrate for Compute Engine versions 4.x, see the 4.x documentation.

Migrate to Virtual Machines architecture

Migrate to Virtual Machines lets you migrate VMs and disks of VMs from the following four migration sources to Google Cloud:

vSphere data center (on-premises)
AWS cloud service
Azure cloud service
Google Cloud VMware Engine

The following diagram shows the architecture for migrating VMs and disks of VMs from various migration sources to Google Cloud:

Migrate to Virtual Machines architecture.

About Google Cloud projects

Google Cloud projects form the basis for creating, enabling, and using Google Cloud services including managing APIs, enabling billing, adding and removing collaborators, and managing permissions for Google Cloud resources.

Google Cloud console

Google Cloud console is the graphical user interface for Google Cloud. Use the Google Cloud console to manage all aspects of migration, access monitoring and logging data, and to configure authentication and authorization.

Cloud IAM

Identity and Access Management (IAM) lets you control access to specific Google Cloud resources and prevents unwanted access to your resources. To give users the ability to create and manage your Compute Engine resources, you can add users as team members to your project or to specific resources and grant them permissions using IAM roles.

Migration sources and targets

A migration is defined by:

The migration source: An on-premises data center or cloud service hosting the VMs or VM disks that you want to migrate. You can define multiple sources on a host project.
The migration target: A Compute Engine VM or Persistent Disk volumes on Google Cloud.
The host project: The project you use to control the migration process is referred to as your host project. Within your host project, you enable the Migrate to Virtual Machines service and any other services required by Migrate to Virtual Machines. Once enabled, you can begin migrating source VMs from the host project, to your migration targets.
The target project: The project that hosts the migration target. You can have multiple target projects to which you can migrate your VMs.

Migration sources

Migrate to Virtual Machines lets you to migrate VMs from the following four migration sources:

vSphere data center: Migrate on-premises VMs from the vSphere data center to Google Cloud.
VMware Engine data center: Migrate VMs from the VMware Engine data center to Compute Engine.
AWS Cloud service: Migrate your EC2 instances from your AWS account to Google Cloud.
Azure Cloud service: Migrate your VM instances from your Azure account to Google Cloud.

Migration targets

A migration target is defined as the following:

For VM migration, the migration target is an instance of Compute Engine running on Google Cloud.
For disk migration, the migration target are Persistent Disk volumes running on Google Cloud.

The project that contains the migration target is called the target project. You can use your host project as a target project, or you can migrate to additional projects. For more information, see Adding a target project.

Use multiple target projects to isolate migrated VMs or disks from each other. For example, it is recommended to isolate a Compute Engine VM used for testing from those used for production. You can use projects and VPCs to create sandbox environments for testing that are separate from your production environments. For more information, see Decide a resource hierarchy for your Google Cloud landing zone.

You can also use the Deployment Manager to deploy migrated VMs or VM disks to production across multiple projects. See Using Images from Other Projects for more.

Along with the Migrate to Virtual Machines services, you also use the following Google Cloud services when performing a migration.

Compute Engine

Compute Engine lets you create and run VMs on Google Cloud. Compute Engine offers scale, performance, and value that lets you launch large compute clusters on Google's infrastructure.

As part of defining the migration target, you set the project of the Compute Engine VM. The characteristics of the target Compute Engine instance are based on the requirements of the migrated VM. You can customize the Compute Engine VM to specify:

Google Cloud project
Number of CPUs
Amount of memory
Disk type
Network configuration
many other options

You might have different requirements on the target Compute Engine VM based on whether the instance is being used for testing a migrated VM or being used in a production environment. For example, you might test the migrated VM in a single Compute Engine VM with 2 CPUs and 8 GB of RAM. Then, when you move to a production environment, you define target Compute Engine instances with different characteristics, such as 4 or 8 CPUs, and 16 GB of RAM.

Persistent Disk

Persistent Disk are durable network storage devices that your Compute Engine VMs can access like physical disks in a desktop or a server. The data on each persistent disk is distributed across several physical disks. Compute Engine manages the physical disks and the data distribution for you to ensure redundancy and optimal performance.