In our last blog post, we defined the differences between virtualization and cloud computing to have a better understanding of migration from a physical server to the cloud. Now, we will discuss migrating physical servers into the cloud. It’s a process described as decoupling and migrating a server’s operating system and data from a physical server to a virtual machine guest hosted on a virtualized platform (or the cloud). According to Search Server Virtualization, one of the best features of server virtualization is the ability to migrate physical server workloads to virtual servers. The physical to virtual migration option enables you to retire aging servers, thus reducing the number of physical servers necessary in a data center. This reduces the amount of space used in addition to power, cooling, hardware and licensing costs, without sacrificing performance. But there are limits to which workloads can be virtualized, and the process of choosing which ones are critical to maintaining a stable environment.

So how do you migrate to a virtual server? Better yet, how do you migrate physical servers directly into the cloud with the fewest number of steps? Typically a physical server first must be virtualized and then migrated into the cloud. According to Search Server Virtualization, you copy the bits residing on a physical disk to a virtual disk, inject some drivers and modify some other bits to support those drivers. Once you’ve virtualized you’ll need to repeat the steps to migrate the server into a cloud. It becomes even more complex when you’re migrating into a cloud environment that runs a different hypervisor than the virtual server you’re migrating. The first step in starting with a physical-to-cloud migration is to identify the tools that you will use to execute your migration and the system you want to migrate.

This is where RiverMeadow’s cloud migration SaaS can come in and take a huge step out of the migration process, automating physical servers directly into the cloud. The RiverMeadow cloud migration SaaS employs four core functions that together automate the migration process from start to finish: collection, conversion, deployment and synchronization. Collection creates an image of the source volumes. Once that task is complete Conversion automatically virtualizes collected images into target hypervisor disk images. The collected images can be converted into as many different target images as desired. During this process, target parameters such as drivers can be injected at the disk image level. The key point here is that you don’t have to migrate twice. The RiverMeadow cloud migration SaaS automatically virtualizes a physical server during the conversion process of migrating the physical server into the target cloud environment. Once conversion is complete and the virtualized physical server has been verified, the RiverMeadow SaaS deploys the disk image to the target cloud environment (e.g. vCloud) where the image is booted as a virtual machine on the target hypervisor, automatically formatting and setting parameters such as disk volume size, OS, memory allocation and so on.

With RiverMeadow cloud migration SaaS, Carriers and Service Providers can migrate enterprise and SMB customer physical servers directly into their cloud environments resulting in faster time to revenue, and for customers, ROI.

To learn more about RiverMeadow’s services contact us at sales@rivermeadow.com.

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