Help Center/ Elastic Cloud Server/ Best Practices/ Migrating Servers to the Cloud
Updated on 2024-03-06 GMT+08:00
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Migrating Servers to the Cloud

Background

As the public cloud is agile, flexible, reliable, easy to use, and cost-effective, more and more enterprises choose to migrate their IT applications and loads to the public cloud. An easy and quick migration method is of great significance for the enterprises. Huawei Cloud allows you to quickly and easily migrate workloads from x86 physical servers or VMs on private clouds or other public cloud platforms to Huawei Cloud ECSs.

Two migration methods are available for you.

  • Server Migration Service (Recommended)
  • Image import

This section describes how to use the preceding methods to migrate applications and data from your existing servers to Huawei Cloud.

Server Migration Service (Recommended)

Service Overview

Server Migration Service (SMS) provides P2V and V2V migration services to help you migrate applications and data from on-premises x86 physical servers or VMs on private or public clouds to Huawei Cloud Elastic Cloud Servers (ECSs).

SMS supports a wide range of OS types. For details, see Supported OSs.

Before using SMS, you need to know constraints on source servers.

Figure 1 SMS working principle

SMS works as follows. SMS automatically performs the migration, and you only need to perform 1 and 3 by yourself.

  1. Install the migration Agent on the source server. For details, see How Do I Download and Install the Agent on Source Servers?
  2. The migration Agent installed on the source server registers its connection status with SMS and reports the information about the source server to SMS. Then, SMS completes the migration feasibility check.
  3. After the migration feasibility check is passed, you can create a migration task. For details, see Creating a Migration Task.
  4. The migration Agent obtains and executes the migration instruction sent by SMS.
  5. SMS starts to migrate system disk of the source server.
  6. SMS starts to migrate data disks of the source server.
  • Source end: indicates the source server in a migration task.
  • Destination end: indicates the destination server in the migration task.
  • Service end: indicates the SMS service.

Service entry

SMS procedure: Creating a Migration Task.

SMS introduction: Server Migration Service.

Image Import

  1. Create an image. For example, you can use QEMU to create an image. See details.
  2. Create a private image. See details.
  3. Create an ECS based on the private image. See Purchasing an ECS.