The Server Migration Service was created to simplify the process of incremental replication of virtual machines from their on-premises infrastructure to Amazon’s cloud.
IT administrators install a connector that will analyze their virtualized server environment and collect information about the instances they’re using. AWS Management Console allows for viewing all the operating connectors and inspect the inventory of virtualized servers running in an environment. Adminstrators can then create and manage replication jobs to take the contents of a VM and reproduce it as an Amazon Machine Image stored in the AWS Elastic Block Store (EBS) service.
Replications can be run on an ongoing schedule and each incremental replication will sync only what has been changed to minimize network bandwidth use. Furthermore it is possible to spin up new instance that should be a duplicate of what is running on-premises. This can be used either for testing the replicated VM or for getting it running in production.
Server Migration Service is available now. Works with regions in northern Virginia, Ireland, and Sydney. Service itself doesn’t carry a charge, but customers must pay for $3 storage used for the move and EBS snapshots that result from the migration process.
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