About infrastructure discovery and assessment

Discovery and assessment are two related activities in the initial part of your migration journey. The ultimate goal of this phase is to gain a deep knowledge of your existing infrastructure to inform the following planning and execution phases.

Get a quick overview of discovery and assessment in Google Cloud Migration Center with the following video.

How discovery works

Discovery is about finding all the components of your infrastructure, including physical machines, VMs, and databases.

Migration Center provides you with the tools you need to automatically scan your on-premises infrastructure to identify all of the components that you need to migrate. For example:

  • Install the Migration Center discovery client to collect data for multiple days, to get complete and detailed information about your infrastructure.
  • Use the command line tool, mcdc CLI, to perform a one-off scan of your infrastructure, such as your VMware environment.
  • Run automated scripts to collect data from other cloud providers or from databases, then import the data into Migration Center for further assessment.

A typical discovery can take on average a few weeks to complete.

How infrastructure assessment works

After you've completed the discovery step and collected your infrastructure data into Migration Center, you group the servers and databases that you want to migrate based on your application or business objective. Then, you create different migration preferences to compare different scenarios. Finally, you generate a total cost of ownership (TCO) report to compare different target products and their costs. Additionally, you can take advantage of the StratoZone integration to get additional reports for your infrastructure.

With Migration Center, you can do the following:

  • Generate detailed reports on all the aspects of your infrastructure.
  • Identify application and network dependencies to learn which components you must migrate together.
  • Get suggestions on the Google Cloud products to migrate your assets to, and find out the costs in advance.
  • Get personalized recommendations to reduce costs and improve performance in your Google Cloud environment.

What's next