Three barriers to data migration of multiple cloud vendors

Migrating applications is not an easy task. Whether you want to move your local infrastructure to the cloud, or spread across multiple cloud vendors, you will face obstacles. Transferring virtual machines, migrating data, and configuring networks can cause problems during migration.

Migrate virtual machines. There are many options for migrating virtual machines between the local infrastructure and the cloud: using shared machine image formats, importing, or refactoring.

The simplest option for migrating VMS is to share picture formats across multiple platforms. By choosing a cloud provider, IT managers are likely to weigh several factors on their existing VM image file format, so finding a generic format requires planning and a bit of luck.

Some cloud vendors import virtual machines as services by building imported VM images for different virtualization platforms. For example, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has imported specific services to VMware based VM images. The service imports VMware ESX VMDK, Citrix Xen Virtual Hard Disk (VHD), and Microsoft Hyper-V VHD images. VM images can also be exported to VMware ESX OVA as these formats.

Refactoring the virtual machine image format is an option, but requires configuration tools such as Puppet and chef. To do this, you need to materialize the script to generate the VM images and run them on your target platform. Configuration scripts allow you to easily and frequently refactor VM images, so you will always have the latest version of the software components. This is important, but you cannot make any mistakes in the application weight process; The Software component upgrade version is not adapted to other components.

Migrate data in the cloud. Migrating data from one cloud platform to another has many challenges. The first step is to access the data storage configuration you enjoy and filter out what data is transferred to the cloud. Note that there are other things to read and write loads, the amount of data you are potentially moving, and network latency issues.

A relational database is typically applied to a client-server structure where client applications are read from a server's database and written to a database on another server. You can choose to migrate clients and servers together, or migrate only one component. Which method is better depends on the number of factors.

Consider a situation where you have a computationally intensive application that writes data to a database in a complex calculator terminal. Assume that the smallest reads are performed on this database. Applications and databases are currently running locally, but peak workloads are present. In this example, the transfer computation load is meaningful to the cloud, but the database remains local. Because the application of read and write is only a small part of the data, the database is still local, does not degrade performance, the user cumulative transfer data or data from the cloud network billing in this scenario is trivial.

But let's assume that the application is a read-intensive database. The network latency between the local database and the cloud-based application degrades performance. In this case, migrating the entire database to the cloud makes more sense, assuming the application will run for a while.

Configure the network for the cloud. A large number of network configuration problems must be addressed when migrating applications to the cloud, or migrating applications from the cloud. The most obvious problem is the problem surrounding the Domain Name Service (DNS). In such an instance, you need to upgrade the record.

The network problem is not so obvious is the intranet configuration. For example, if you use a load balancer to spread your application workload, you need to upgrade the load balancer to use the server in a new location. Other applications, like databases, may need to be reconfigured to address new database server IP addresses.

Transferring VM images and data and configuring network settings can be challenged when transferring applications between the local infrastructure and the cloud. Transferring virtual machine images from one virtual environment to another is relatively easy. migrating large databases or datasets is obviously problematic. Reconfiguring network settings should not be prohibited and should be prepared as early as possible.

TechTarget Chinese original content, original link: http://www.searchcloudcomputing.com.cn/showcontent_64043.htm

(Responsible editor: Lu Guang)