In this episode of the HIPAA Vault Show we explore the complexities of migrating from private data centers to Google Cloud, focusing on VMware environments. Drawing parallels between moving houses and data center migration, we delve into the steps of assessment, planning, and execution. Discover how to navigate skyrocketing VMware license costs and learn about Google’s competitive pricing for VMware on Google Cloud. The episode covers practical tips on inventory management, cost estimation, and using tools like VMware HCX for a smooth transition. Whether you’re facing immediate migration needs or planning for the future, this episode is packed with insights to help you make informed decisions. Tune in for expert advice and stay ahead in the ever-evolving landscape of cloud technology.
VMware HCX https://cloud.google.com/vmware-engine/docs/workloads/howto-migrate-vms-using-hcx
Live migration to Google Cloud VMWare Engine https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/live-migration-process
Do you have any remaining questions, requests, or just want to chat with us? Email us at podcast@hipaavault.com!
Transcript:
Adam
Hello, and welcome to the hipaa Vault show, where we discuss all things HIPAA compliance in the cloud. My name is Adam Zeineddine, and I’m joined by Gil Vidals, CTO of Hipaa vault. Hey, Gil.
Gil
Hey, Adam. Welcome to the podcast, end of Friday. Hope you’re doing well.
Adam
Happy Friday. Yes, I’m doing very well, thanks. And you?
Gil
Hey, doing great. Ready to get started?
Adam
Yeah, I’m actually in the process of moving house over the next week or so, and, you know, it’s thinking a lot about the, you know, moving and, you know, moving items, moving furniture, that kind of stuff. So I think it’s a good time for us to discuss migration from one data center to another. So. Yeah. So with that in mind, we’re going to be talking today about migrating from private data centers to Google cloud, and specifically when it comes to VMware. Last week’s episode touched on pricing models for VMware and how they’ve been changing recently. And so we’ve seen an increased demand to shift away from the private data center model and look into Google Cloud because they offer competitor pricing for customers that want to stay within the VMware environment.
Adam
So coming at it from the aspect of moving house and keeping it kind of simple, what I’ve been doing over the past couple of months, obviously, is a fair amount of planning to move where we’re moving from about the same size house, three bedroom to another three bedroom. And so the planning has been what furniture are we going to be keeping, how do we need to move it, what additional stuff do we need when we move into the new house? Taking an inventory. Obviously, we chose the house based on a neighborhood, options around. And then after the assessment of planning, there’s preparing for the move. So am I going to get some movers to come and do the moving for me? What days am I going to do it on? How much time do I have?
Adam
If those kind of things went into whether we’re going to hire help and how much help we’re going to hire. And then there’s the actual day of the move, what equipment do we need, stuff like that, and then the setting up the house once we move over. So I think, using that analogy, I think we can probably talk a little bit about the migration on the vmware side. I think it probably starts with the same way that a house move starts, with a bit of assessment and planning. How does that transpire? Private data center to Google Cloud?
Gil
Yeah, no, that’s. I like your analogy, the moving from one house to the other. Seems simple, right? It’s just stuff. Just move it. But it’s more complicated because of all the steps involved. But I did want to back up a little bit and tell the audience that is, in that painful situation where the VMware license cost has skyrocketed because Broadcom has purchased VMware and has decided for some segment of their customers to increase the price by, we’ve heard five times to ten times. We don’t really know exactly. It’s. It’s painful, though. I mean, the point is, it wasn’t just your typical, you know, recessionary 1015 percent. This was many multiples. Five, six, 7800%. If you’re paying that much, maybe moving to the Google VMware platform.
Gil
So Google has vmware within the Google platform, and you may not either a, be aware of that, or b, you were aware of it, but at some point it was more expensive, let’s say in the past it was ten or 15 points, 20% more expensive than what you currently have. And so that wasn’t an option for you. But now that your price has gone up five to ten x, now the Google solution seems very cheap. I think this solution is going to work. Well. Now, Adam and I looked at this together, and we realized that this is for somebody. What was the entry level cost, Adam, that we did some calculation. Was it ten or 20,000 per month?
Adam
Yeah, it was around 10,000.
Gil
10,000, okay. About 10,000 entry points. So obviously, if you only have a few virtual machines, then this is not going to be the right solution. But this is meant for someone who’s got dozens and dozens of systems, and their bill has just gone astronomically high, and they’re looking for a better solution. So here’s a great solution for you in the Google cloud net, but then we have to migrate. So how do you migrate? What do you do? Like he said, when you’re moving house, first you got to take inventory of what you have. So you’d have to fully inventory. Listen, and in VMware, that’s easy, right? You can go to your inventory tab and just click on that and say, okay, this is what I have. This is how much cpu, how much ram, give me my price.
Gil
What do I need to do to get into Google VMware, the VMware engine. And we can say, okay, here’s how much ram, cpu. And so that’s the inventory step. And getting it costed out is the next step, too, to figure out, okay, is this cost going to be acceptable? Is it within your budget. So I would say those are the first two steps, Adam, is get the inventory, get a quote, make sure you understand this is in your budget, and at least you’ll have a plan then.
Adam
Okay, so you got the inventory. You know what you know how much the new house is going to cost for the data center to run. You’re happy with. You’re happy with that. What else is there on the planning side is that I’m assuming there’s. There’s some sort of connection that needs to be established between the two data centers.
Gil
Yeah. For the actual move, there’s an appliance that Google makes available, and I was just looking at my screen, so I forgot what it stands for. But it’s called VMware HCX.
Adam
Yeah, hybrid cloud extension.
Gil
Yeah, hybrid cloud extension. It says abstracts vsphere based resources in your VMware environment and cloud resources and presents them to applications as one continuous resource. Creating a hybrid infrastructure, we would have to set that up, this HCX extension, and that has to be. That’s one of the first steps you have to do. So you deploy the HCX cloud manager appliance, and then that’s what’s going to be your tool for doing the migrating, so that this tool will see both environments, it’ll see your current environment, and then it’ll see the new Google environment. So sort of a bridge point. So that’s pretty neat. Pretty neat that Google makes that available.
Adam
So it’s almost like when you’re packing the boxes up in the house, you write this boxes for the living room and it has these contents in it so that when it moves to the other house, you know what the purpose of the box is and what the contents are. Right. So you install the extension in your existing environment and your I, your Google cloud environment so that it can map. I think that’s what it’s doing here. It’s mapping where that virtual machine is and where it’s going to be and all the connections that it needs.
Gil
Yeah, I think it makes it simpler in the sense that this bridge is going to be aware of both environments. It’s going to see your whole inventory on the left side. Say that’s where you are now. Say the left side is where you’re, your current platform is your VMware vsphere. And then on the right side is blank because that’s the Google cloud, that’s your vmware vsphere platform. On the right side, there’s nothing there. And then it can say, okay, let’s plan the migration. Like, is this going to be a cold migration? You’re going to power up systems and move them. Is it going to be a v motion where it’s live? You’re going to say this thing I want to say live during the move, or is it going to be a bulk move?
Gil
You’re going to say, take all these, you know, Saturday I’m going to power off these 20 systems and just start moving them over the weekend. So you have to decide how you want to perform the migration and scheduling them. So how, meaning do you want a system powered on or off? Do you want it bulk or are you going to do it just single one at a time?
Adam
And that probably depends on the nature of what’s running in the data center, right. Whether they’re applications that are being used 24/7 how critical they are.
Gil
Right? Yeah, you’re right about that. If it’s, you know, we have a lot of customers that say, well, you know, it’s very critical, Monday through Friday, eight, five, very critical. But on the weekend, they relax. They’re like, oh, yeah, nobody’s, you know, nobody’s in the office. No one’s in the medical office, so we don’t care. You power it up, do whatever you want. So that’s good to know. Now, I have seen cases where some big behemoth of a VM takes more than two days to move. That sounds ridiculous, but if the bandwidth at the origin location is weak or something, there’s some reason it’s just big and there’s slow, big files.
Adam
Yeah, yeah.
Gil
It could take a long time. So if you’re thinking, oh, that’s fine, I’ll move this Saturday morning at 08:00 a.m. It’ll be done in the evening. You’d be surprised. You might say, oh, my gosh, it’s Sunday at midnight. This thing’s not done. What if business hours start and this thing hasn’t finished? What am I going to do? So you have to think about that in your planning. Like, what are the size of these systems? And you could do a test migration. You could try to mic when you migrate. The last step is to cut over the DNS and the IP so that even though it’s migrated, there’s one more step. So the system’s migrated, it’s there, but you have to update your DNS to point to a new ip address.
Gil
But you could always test this whole thing and say, okay, how long did it take to migrate that machine with these tools? Which really neat Adam, too, is that it starts to copy everything over. But right before you cut over, it’ll do one more copy. It’ll make sure that everything is completely synced right before you cut over and say, okay, I’m done with the old one, I’m going to use a new one. And then there’s this cutover point at which now this one is live and the other one is the legacy one. So that’s kind of a view, high level view of how this works. What we talked about now is good. It’s more for planning and just kind of getting a general understanding.
Gil
But the next podcast, we can get more into the nitty gritty details, get into the weeds, as they say, on the technical side, and we can break it down from that point of view. I think that might be useful.
Adam
Absolutely. Yeah.
Gil
Great. Well, good. Well, this was a good conversation. I hope the audience is encouraged to know that there is an ow when you’re looking at your bill. It’s important that instead of just being shocked about your new bill, we’ve gotten contacted by companies like, oh my gosh, you have no idea. My bill’s gone up this high. And it’s always a rush. It’s like, oh, we got to move out, you know, in five days because there are billing cycle in five days, we’re going to have to pay this new bill. We want to move out. Well, you can’t move out necessarily that quickly. Depends on how many systems you have. So it’s good that you plan, give yourself a full month.
Gil
You know, it’s like if you heard this podcast and now you’re in a hurry, like, well, let’s get ahold of Adam here, let’s get that quote, let’s get going. But consider a month’s timeframe would probably be a reasonable timeframe, especially if you have a big number of systems. It could take a while. By the time you plan it, get the right teams together and everything is going to take a little while. Now you say, well, a month is too long. I need to be out in the week. Well, I’m just saying a month is on the outside, right? I mean, if it’s a real big, complex vmware setup that you have currently, and you want to keep that working the same way, what’s going to take time if it’s that complex?
Gil
Now, if you just have 100 systems and they’re kind of just doing their own thing, there’s not a lot of interconnectivity between them and just sort of independent servers doing their thing then maybe, you know, that wouldn’t take as long.
Adam
Yeah. Yeah. And to finally go back to the house analogy, if you only have a couple of days to move house, that might be an indication of some larger problems at hand in the organization. And so be prepared for a certain amount of chaos during that time because, yeah. There’s a good amount of planning that goes into this thing. So it might be a case of, okay, we need to move quick. So what are the critical systems that can’t fail? We’ll migrate them over and the rest we can kind of do.
Gil
Right. Right.
Adam
With a little bit more time. Yeah.
Gil
Yeah.
Adam
Absolutely. That’s all for this episode. Please, like share and subscribe. And until next time, thanks for stopping by.