RackWare Management Module (RMM) provides an automated, easy and convenient process to move existing workloads to IBM Cloud from the IBM Classic environment.
Over the past decade, with hardware advancements like newer processors and specialized chips, compute virtualization has risen in adoption. More often than not, it is now the de facto choice of deployment over bare metal servers. A lot of today’s applications that were once deployed on bare metal are now suitable to be run on virtual servers.
There are still use cases and needs for physical servers, but workloads that can move to virtual servers are presented with new and important advantages. With this advancement, technical teams will be able to take advantage of powerful cloud-native capabilities, such as APIs for scale/elasticity and faster provisioning of virtual servers in minutes.
This heralds enterprises into an era of many possibilities for conducting infrastructure in a way that provides many benefits. Some of the benefits include the following:
- Reduced total cost of ownership (TCO)
- Faster time to market for applications
- Easy workload migrations between compute nodes
- Automated orchestration of infrastructure and platform services
- Centralized security management at the hypervisor layer
- Cloud-native abilities
Why IBM Cloud VPC?
IBM Cloud VPC helps you deploy a secure private environment in the public cloud, and it utilizes all the above merits of virtualized cloud operations. All this comes with security at the subnet using Access Control Lists (ACLs) that are defined using ports, protocols and IP addresses and also at the Virtual Server Instance (VSI) level using security groups that are collections of ACLs. These improvements increase the availability of services by letting you plan and deploy the same set of services in Multizone Regions (MZRs). This creates a global presence for your business service, attaining the agility required to scale cloud resources in real-time. Importantly, prices are commoditized for all the cloud resources, immediately offering reduced TCO.
How to plan your migration to IBM Cloud VPC
Today, IBM offers a way to migrate your x86 workloads to IBM Cloud VPC that is non-disruptive, hardware-agnostic and secure. You can also do active delta sync until cutover is performed between your source physical server and virtual server instance in the IBM Cloud VPC. This is achieved by using RackWare Inc.’s mobility solution that is integrated into the IBM VPC to migrate physical workloads:
RackWare Management Module (RMM) provides an automated, easy and convenient process to move existing workloads to IBM Cloud from the IBM Classic environment. It lets you create an exact duplicate of a running source image without the burden of rebuilding or recreating template images and applications. Migrating large, complex environments through a simple intuitive user interface with automated tasks reduces the time required from weeks to days. It keeps track of data changes on source until cutover and performs delta syncs to the target VSI in IBM Cloud. On top of all of this, it helps you with automated wave planning for migrations that can be further customized.
RMM is well-engineered for various platform operating systems (OS), covers most of your scripting needs for migration and houses appropriate drivers that are needed in your new target environment for each OS. The RMM software platform delivers simplified migration to the cloud while reducing capital and operating expenses. RMM decouples the application stack from the underlying hardware platform, allowing it to be migrated to the IBM Cloud infrastructure. It includes discovery, analysis and automation features, allowing all processes to be fast, convenient and error-free. The number of migrations that can be performed is based on a subscription model for licensing that is flexible to the needs of customers.
Key benefits
- Non-disruptive/live migrations
- Highly secure and efficient data transfer
- Include/exclude lists: Capture and sync-only specific files and directories rather than entire systems
- Delta sync only the changed parts of files during the final data sync, drastically lowering cutover times
- Network optimization with bandwidth usage limitations, compression and checkpoint restart for all sync operations
- Can be extended to provide disaster recovery
- Bring your own license (BYOL) for a number of migrations
Moving to IBM Cloud VPC
Whether you have previous experience from moving bare metal servers to virtual servers, or if this is your first time, RackWare Management Module helps make the transition a lot easier. By leveraging the RMM tool, you will be able to move and take advantage of the new cloud-native capabilities of IBM Cloud VPC.
