Estimating the cost of migrating servers to the public cloud

Use the cloud migration simulation to evaluate the opportunity and cost effectiveness of migrating servers (compute resources) that are hosted in your on-premises infrastructure to the public cloud (AWS and Azure). The simulation results enable you to quickly determine the projected cost of using the public cloud and compare the cost with that of your on-premises infrastructure. 

You can simulate the migration of servers (from the By Servers page) or of servers that a business service uses (from the By Business Service > Business Service Cost Details page). For every server to be migrated, you can view the optimized recommendations for instance sizes and other associated characteristics on the public cloud. You can modify these characteristics and evaluate the impact of the change on the overall migration cost. 

The backend simulation algorithm in the Cost Estimation service is based on the Lift-and-Shift strategy. For more information, see Cloud migration process. 

The cloud migration simulation feature enables you to achieve the following goals: 

• Compare the on-premises and public cloud costs for the same set of servers.
• Evaluate the estimated monthly cost of migrating to the public cloud.
• Evaluate the characteristics of the proposed or recommended instances on the public cloud.
• Customize or modify the characteristics of the proposed instances and evaluate the impact on the migration cost.

For more information, see the following sections:

Workflow to simulate the cloud migration

To estimate the cost of migrating servers to the public clouds

1. Select the service or servers to be migrated and run the simulation. 
• To migrate servers: 
  1. In the navigation pane of the TrueSight console, select Cloud Cost Control and then, click the By Servers tab.
  2. Click Simulate Cloud Migration.

  3. From the list of the servers, select the servers that you want to migrate.
     
     

     Tip

     Use tags to filter out servers so that you have a shorter list of servers to select from. For example, to select servers from your Development environment only, you can filter out the list of servers by applying the appropriate (for example, Dev) tag, and then select servers from this filtered list. For more information about tag filters, see Working with tag filters.

  4. Click Apply.
     The Simulate migration for # servers page opens, where # is the number of servers that you selected in the earlier step. 
     
     
• To migrate a business service: 
1. In the navigation pane of the TrueSight console, select Cloud Cost Control and click the By Business Service tab.
2. Click the name of the business service that you want to migrate.
3. In the Business Service Cost Details page, click Simulate Cloud Migration.
   The Simulate migration for service: <Business service> page opens, where <Business service> is the name of the selected business service.
   
   

2. Depending on the cloud provider that you want to evaluate further, click AWS or Azure.
   The page displays a table for the server from the source cloud provider. Each table has two rows (Before and After). Values of the selected server's characteristics are displayed in the Before row and those of the proposed instance on the public cloud are displayed in the After row.

3. Evaluate the simulation results.
   Review the total migration cost estimates and characteristics of the proposed migrated instances on the public cloud.

   

   The screenshot shows the Simulation results page when simulation is initiated from the By Server page. The AWS cloud provider is selected in this example

   Label	Description
   A	Estimate of the total monthly cost of the servers that you want to migrate. This cost is an estimate based on the characteristics of the servers that are selected for migration. Your actual monthly cost might be different.
   B	Estimate of the total monthly cost of migrating to the public cloud providers. Costs for the following payment modes or billing options are provided: On-demand or pay-as-you-go  Full upfront yearly payment1 Full upfront payment for three years1 1 - For AWS, the costs are calculated based on the prices that they published for reserved instances. For Azure, the costs are calculated by considering a discount of 20% on the total monthly cost because Azure does not publish a catalog of prices for reserved instances. The simulation provides an estimate of the migration costs based on the characteristics of the selected servers. Your actual monthly costs will be based on your usage, and might vary from these estimates.
   C	Net percentage increase or decrease in cost after migration. This estimated value indicates whether the migration is cost-effective or not.
   D	Suggested region where the migrated server will reside. You can modify the region and view the impact of this change on the cost of migration.
   E	Configuration details of the server to be migrated. Values for the following characteristics are displayed: Instance type, operating system that the instance is running, cost of the server, number of CPU cores, CPU utilization, allocated memory, memory utilization, storage type, amount of storage or storage size, and storage utilization.
   F	Configuration details of the proposed server or instance on the public cloud. You can decide to modify the instance type of this instance based on the catalog of instances that are available for the selected public cloud provider. You can also modify other characteristics. For more information, go to the next step.

   
   
   Information: The CPU Util, Memory Util, and Disk Util columns display color-coded bars as per the vCPU, Memory, and Storage values, respectively. The utilization bar colors are based on the following threshold ranges:

   Color	Threshold range
   Green	Between Good and Warning threshold
   Yellow	Between Warning and Risk threshold
   Red	Above Risk threshold

   If the CPU, memory, or storage utilization of a proposed instance (in After row) exceeds the Risk threshold, then a warning symbol is displayed next to the value. 
   For more information about thresholds, see  Adding and viewing thresholds.
   
   

4. Customize the proposed instance characteristics as per your requirement and re-evaluate the migration costs and other updated values. 
   You can modify the following characteristics:

   Characteristic/Column	Description
   Region	Change the region to one that is closer to your user base or to locate your services geographically closer to those users.
   For every proposed instance, in the After row:
   Instance Type	Modify the instance type based on the catalog of instances that are available for the selected public cloud provider. You can decide whether you want to modify the instance type by reviewing the other characteristics of the proposed instance. For example, the proposed AWS instance type is c4.8xlarge. The CPU Util shows 10%, Memory Util shows 50%, and Disk Util shows 12%. These values indicate that the instance is oversized and underutilized, and hence, you might want to select an instance type with a smaller configuration.
   Operating System	Modify the default operating system that the instance is running.
   Storage Type and Storage	Specify the amount of storage that you need to buy for the selected server. To specify storage for your instance, select a storage type from the predefined list. Consider the following points depending on the public cloud that you choose: AWS Azure The Storage type column shows a list of the Amazon EBS volume types. For more information, see Amazon EBS Volume Types . The Storage type column shows a list of the Azure Virtual Machine Disk Storage types. For more information, see Azure Storage . Some instance types have default instance storage associated with them (shown as Instance storage in the Storage column). You can specify additional storage to be allocated to your instance in the Extra storage box. Some instance types have default instance storage associated with them (shown as Instance storage in the Storage column). For the Unmanaged Standard storage type, you can specify the additional storage to be allocated to your instance in the Extra storage box. For the Provisioned IOPs and Magnetic storage types, you need to specify the Daily IOPs value too because the computation of storage for this type is based on both the storage value and the daily number of I/O operations made per second to your volume. For the Managed and Unmanaged Premium storage types, a default amount of storage (Disk size) is associated with each storage type. If you need additional storage, you cannot directly specify the amount, but need to provide the number of disks of a specific storage type, as follows: a. Select a storage type. b. Based on the default storage value of the selected storage type and your requirement, specify the number of disks in Disk Number box. The value in the Extra storage box is automatically updated. For example, if the default storage for the selected storage type is 512 GB and you specify the number of disks as 2, then the Extra storage box value will show 1024.00 (calculated as: 512 x 2).

   After you change the characteristic values for an instance, the simulation results are updated.
   The Cost value for the instance and the total migration cost estimates for the corresponding cloud provider might change. Changes to the instance type can cause a change to the vCPU, memory, and Storage values, and changes to the storage type updates the storage value. As a result, the corresponding utilization values are re-computed and the CPU Util, Memory Util, and Disk Util values are updated.
   
   

5. To save an offline copy of the simulation results page, click Export to PDF.

Cloud to cloud migration scenarios

Along with the scenario of migrating servers that are hosted in your on-premises infrastructure to the public cloud providers, the following migration scenarios are also supported:

In case all the servers that are selected for migration are hosted on a public cloud, then the simulation results show the migration of the servers to the other public cloud only.

As shown in the following screenshot, all the servers that are selected for migration are hosted on AWS. The simulation results page shows the migration to Azure only.

In case of a hybrid scenario where some of the selected servers are hosted on a public cloud while some servers are hosted in your on-premises infrastructure.