Accelerate VMware migration planning using AWS Transform discovery tool

AWS Transform for VMware is the first agentic AI service developed to accelerate VMware workload migration and modernization. With the latest release of new agentic capabilities, AWS Transform for VMware provides intelligent application discovery, dependency mapping and wave planning by adapting to your business and environment requirements, and gives you greater control at every migration step.

Besides, the new AWS Transform discovery tool allows you to collect VMware workload inventory data in an offline/air-gapped vSphere environment. Deployed as an OVA (Open Virtualization Format) image, this tool automatically discovers and collects detailed meta data about your environment, including server specifications and network connections. In addition, it captures critical information such as resource utilization for right-sizing recommendations, database metadata, and connected TCP ports for dependency mapping. All collected data remains securely stored within your on-premises infrastructure until you choose to proceed with the migration using AWS Transform.

In this post, we demonstrate how to deploy the new AWS Transform discovery tool in a vSphere environment to enable intelligent application discovery and waves planning, using AWS Transform for VMware capabilities.

Pre-requisites

To begin your setup, you must have the following:

• Access to an on-premises vSphere vCenter environment (6.5+)
• AWS Organizations setup
• AWS IAM Identity Center setup
• AWS Accounts:
  • Migration planning account – AWS Transform runs in this account, and is recommended for running workload discovery and migration planning
  • Target accounts – Destination accounts for your migrated workloads. (although required for migration, it will not be used in this demo)

Deploy the AWS Transform discovery tool

1. Follow the AWS Transform user guide to download the discovery tool OVA from this URL: https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/atx.discovery.collector.bundle/releases/latest/AWS-Transform-discovery-tool.ova  
2. Once the file is downloaded, log into your vCenter and deploy it using the Deploy OVF Template option.  
3. Next, we'll configure a static IP address for the discovery tool so we can access its management console and/or apply firewall rules accordingly. Follow this AWS re:Post for more details. Note the discovery tool VM comes by default with a username and password (discovery, password).  
4. Now open a browser page and navigate to https://<discovery-tool-ip-address>:5000/ to access its management console. You'll be asked to set up a new admin password.

Set up the discovery tool

1. Within the discovery tool console, navigate to Collector configuration > Edit vCenter Access to enter your vCenter server management URL and credentials.  
2. You should see the vCenter collector status changed to “Connected” within a few seconds. Next, click Edit OS access to configure OS credentials for collecting network connection data, database metrics and detailed VM statistics.  
3. I'll configure the SNMPv3 credentials used by my Linux workloads.  
4. Alternatively, you can use SSH as the discovery protocol if you don't have SNMP agents installed in your environment  
5. I'll also add WinRM credentials used by Windows workloads.  
6. Switch to the Discovered inventory view, we can see the discovery tool is now successfully collecting workload data, including VM inventory, network connections and database metrics etc. You can find more details about the data being collected as documented here.  
7. Switch back to Collector configuration view, verify that all modules successfully completed their initial data collection - this should be automatically completed within a few minutes. Alternatively, you could use the Actions button to manually trigger a collection.  
8. Back at the Discovered inventory, we are now ready to download discovered VM inventory data. For a large scale migration, we recommend you leave the discovery tool running for at least 1~2 weeks to ensure enough data is getting collected before moving into migration planning.
   

Use discovered data for AWS Transform VMware migration planning

1. Follow this user guide to enable AWS Transform and create a workspace. Then, create an end-to-end VMware migration job.  
2. Once you start the job workflow, it will soon ask you to upload a discovered VMware inventory file. Upload the file as you just downloaded from previous section.  
3. After the file getting processed by AWS Transform, you'll have a chance to explore and visualize the discovered VM inventory data.  
4. Additionally, you'll find the collected application network dependency data, including source and destination server ip addresses, TCP ports and application processes information etc.
5. After that, AWS Transform gives me an overview of the total discovered VM inventory.
6. As an example, I can also interact with AWS Transform to customise the migration scope. Specifically, I'm asking it to remove workload 1,6,7 (infrastructure management VMs) from the list.
7. Finally, AWS Transform provides an (updated) summary view, including servers to be migrated and removed, network connectivity, and auto-discovered application group patterns. With the discovered VM workload inventory and application patterns, I'm now ready to proceed to the migration planning phase.

Conclusion

This post walked through an example on how to deploy the new AWS Transform discovery tool, and how to use the discovered data within AWS Transform to enable automatic application discovery and waves planning for accelerating VMware migrations.

To learn more, refer to these additional resources:

• AWS Transform for VMware
• Accelerating VMware migration: AWS Transform’s new experience
• AWS Transform user guide