Start an asset discovery

With Google Cloud Migration Center, you can discover physical servers and virtual machine (VM) instances in your infrastructure hosted on-premises or on other cloud providers, and gather detailed information about every component.

Collection methods

Migration Center lets you collect data from your infrastructure in different ways to give you the flexibility to balance speed and depth of discovery.

Migration Center supports three approaches:

  • Automated one-time collection
  • Automated continuous collection
  • Manual data import

The following sections help you decide which method and tools to use depending on your use case.

Automated one-time collection

Automated one-time collection lets you get a snapshot of your infrastructure at a given time. You can use this to quickly collect performance data from your physical or virtual machine (VM) instances. You can also collect historical performance and networking information, if this is available at the hypervisor level.

To perform an automated one-time collection, download and run the Migration Center discovery client CLI, then scan your infrastructure. Finally, export the collected configuration and performance data to Migration Center. To learn how data collection works with the mcdc CLI, see Migration Center discovery client CLI overview.

Automated continuous collection

Automated continuous collection lets you get the full information about your infrastructure over a period of time with scheduled collection capabilities.

To perform continuous collection, install the discovery client on a Windows machine and allow it to periodically scan your infrastructure and gather configuration and performance data. To learn how automatic data collection works, see Migration Center discovery client overview.

Manual data import

Manual data import lets you fully control which data to upload to Migration Center.

You can manually import data into Migration Center with the following methods:

Choose your data collection tool

The following table can help you choose between the data collection tools that Migration Center offers. You can also use multiple tools for your assessment. For example, you can start with a manual or one-time collection, then switch to the continuous collection after you get an initial view of your infrastructure. Or, you might have a heterogeneous environment that requires different methods to assess everything that you want to migrate.

Collected environment Collection method
Manual Automated
(one-time)		 Automated
(continuous)
Virtual machines on vCenter RVTools export mcdc CLI Discovery client
Virtual machines on other hypervisors Manually filled-in template mcdc CLI* Discovery client
Physical servers Manually filled-in template mcdc CLI* Discovery client
Virtual machines on AWS Cloud collection scripts mcdc CLI Not available
Virtual machines on Azure Cloud collection scripts Not available Not available
Databases Collection scripts Not available Discovery client

* Use the mcdc CLI for Windows if you need to collect data directly from Windows hosts.

Security and privacy

For every server in your existing environment, Migration Center collects the following information:

  • Machine information
  • Configuration data
  • Utilization data
  • Network dependencies
  • Installed software

The breadth of data collected depends on the collection method you select, as well as any security settings that are applied during setup.

Other than IP addresses, Migration Center doesn't collect personally identifiable information (PII) or data subject to PCI or HIPAA compliance requirements. Migration Center doesn't collect data from within your applications or file storage. For more information about the data collected, see Collection methods.

All collected data is used solely to analyze your IT infrastructure for a cloud assessment and migration plan. Your data is never sold to any third parties.

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