Help Center/ Server Migration Service/ FAQs/ Product Consultation/ How Does Migration Using SMS Differ from Migration Using IMS?
Updated on 2025-11-06 GMT+08:00
View PDF

How Does Migration Using SMS Differ from Migration Using IMS?

Migration Using SMS

SMS helps you migrate applications and data from x86 physical or virtual servers on premises or in other private or public clouds to ECSs on Huawei Cloud.

Advantages

  • Ease of use

    You just need to install and configure the Agent on source servers and configure the target servers and start the migration on the SMS console. SMS takes care of the remaining work automatically.

  • Seamless migration

    Your services do not have to go down during the migration. If the network is interrupted during migration, SMS allows you to restart the migration and continue transferring data from where it left off.

  • High security

    The Agent installed on source servers uses AK/SK pairs for authentication. Dynamically generated SSL certificates and keys are used to encrypt transmission channels for data security.

Constraints

For details, see What OSs Can Be Migrated and What Are the Restrictions on Using SMS?

Migration Using IMS

If you want to migrate a server using IMS, you need to complete the initial network and driver (Xen or KVM) configurations on the server, create an image of the server, import the image to the IMS console, and use the image to create an ECS.

Advantages

  • IMS enables you to import images (in VHD, VMDK, QCOW2, or RAW format) of existing servers to the cloud platform.
    • The supported formats include VHD, VMDK, QCOW2, RAW, VHDX, QCOW, VDI, QED, ZVHD, and ZVHD2. Image files in other formats need to be converted into any of these supported formats before being imported. The open-source tool qemu-img can be used for conversion.
    • The supported OSs includes SUSE, Oracle Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu, openSUSE, CentOS, Debian, Fedora, and EulerOS.
  • IMS allows you to share or replicate images across regions to migrate ECSs between accounts and regions.
  • IMS enables you to create system and data disk images and use these images on the cloud platform for batch deployment.

Constraints

Local storage space is occupied, and only image files no larger than 1 TB can be imported.

Parent Topic: Product Consultation