Introduction
In previous posts I have looked at the AWS VM Import/Export tools and the process for getting a copy of an on-premises VM into AWS. That process is fairly long winded and is only really suitable for servers that can tolerate fairly long outages, such as Test and Development servers. Amazon also provide a tool that will allow you to do an on-line migration. This is the Server Migration Service (SMS). SMS has quite a bit in common with tools such as PlateSpin Migrate. One key advantage is that it is a free offering (currently limited to 50 simultaneous workload migrations). I have recently used SMS to migrate a reasonable number of Hyper-V and VMware workloads into AWS and I will be providing a detailed account of the Hyper-V process here in the next few weeks.