Migrating VMs with Migrate for Compute Engine: Getting started

This document is the first of a series that guides you through migrating your virtual machines (VMs) from your source environment to Google Cloud by using Migrate for Compute Engine. Your source environment might be running in an on-premises environment, in a private hosting environment, or in another cloud provider.

This document provides an overview of Migrate for Compute Engine and what it's used for. It also contains important points for you to consider when planning a VM migration, and provides guidance about how to migrate VMs.

This document is part of a multi-part series about migrating to Google Cloud. If you're interested in an overview of the series, see Migration to Google Cloud: Choosing your migration path.

This document is part of a series:

This document is useful if you're planning to migrate VMs from a supported source environment to Compute Engine with Migrate for Compute Engine. These source environments can include the following:

Migrate for Compute Engine lets you streamline your VM migration to Google Cloud. You don't have to spend effort in designing and implementing a reliable toolchain to manually evaluate how your VMs behave in Google Cloud, and then to manually migrate them. Migrate for Compute Engine accelerates your VM migration, saves you time, and lets you focus on improving your workloads.

This series assumes that you have read and are familiar with the following documents:

Designing the migration to Google Cloud

To migrate your VMs from your source environment to Google Cloud, we recommend that you follow the framework described in the Migration to Google Cloud series.

The following diagram illustrates the path of your migration journey.

Migration path with four phases.

The framework illustrated in the preceding diagram has four phases:

  1. Assess. In this phase, you assess your source environment, assess the workloads that you want to migrate to Google Cloud, and assess which VMs support each workload.
  2. Plan. In this phase, you create the basic infrastructure for Migrate for Compute Engine, such as provisioning the resource hierarchy and setting up network access.
  3. Deploy. In this phase, you migrate the VMs from the source environment to Compute Engine.
  4. Optimize. In this phase, you begin to take advantage of the cloud technologies and capabilities.

Assessing the source environment and workloads

In the assess phase, you gather information about your source environment and the workloads that you want to migrate. Assessing your source environment and the workloads that you want to migrate is crucial to plan your migration and to rightsize the resources that you need for the migration and your target environment.

The process for assessing your source environment and workloads isn't unique for using Migrate for Compute Engine to migrate your VMs. For more information about how to assess your source environment, refer to Migration to Google Cloud: Assessing and discovering your workloads.

What's next