Migrate to Virtual Machines 5.0 release notes

Experimental: As CentOS Linux 7 has reached end-of-life (EOL) on June 30, 2024, Migrate to Virtual Machines lets you convert CentOS Linux 7 to Rocky Linux 8 as part of your migration.

To use this feature, send a request to the email address: [email protected].

Note: This product or feature is subject to the Pre-GA Offerings Terms in the General Service Terms section of the Service Specific Terms. Pre-GA products and features are available as is and might have limited support.

Generally available: Migrate to Virtual Machines lets you import a machine image from a virtual appliance. You can use machine images to store the configuration, metadata, permissions, and data from one or more disks for a virtual machine (VM) instance running on Compute Engine.

Generally available: Migrate to Virtual Machines lets you import a virtual disk image to a Compute Engine image. If you have virtual disk images with software and configurations that you need, you can save time by importing these virtual disk images to Compute Engine images, and use this image to create virtual machine instances or persistent disks.

Migrate to Virtual Machines now supports importing virtual disk image files in the following formats:

• QEMU copy-on-write (QCOW)
• QEMU copy-on-write 2 (QCOW2)
• QEMU enhanced disk format (QED)
• VPC
• Virtual disk image (VDI)
• Virtual hard disk v2 (VHDX)
• Virtual hard disk (VHD)

In addition to these formats, Virtual machine disk (VMDK), and raw files compressed as a .tar.gz file are also supported.

Preview: Migrate to Virtual Machines supports the ARM64 migration journey. This feature lets you migrate ARM virtual machine (VM) instances from AWS and Azure cloud services to ARM VM instances on Compute Engine, and it is supported for the following operating systems:

• Debian 11 and 12
• RHEL 9
• Rocky Linux 8 and 9
• SLES 15 SP5
• Ubuntu 20.04 and 22.04

Preview: Migrate to Virtual Machines lets you import a virtual disk image to a Compute Engine image. If you have virtual disk images with software and configurations that you need, you can save time by importing these virtual disk images to Compute Engine images, and use this image to create virtual machine instances or persistent disks.

Generally available: You can now use Customer-Managed Encryption Keys (CMEK) in Migrate to Virtual Machines to do the following:

• Protect data stored by Migrate to Virtual Machines during the migration process.
• Protect data of the migrated VMs created by clone and cut-over operations for all sources - AWS, Azure, and VMware.

Generally available: Migrate to Virtual Machines lets you migrate virtual machine (VM) disks to Persistent Disk volumes on Google Cloud. The migrated disks can be attached to a new VM during the migration process, or an existing VM after the migration is complete.

Preview: Migrate to Virtual Machines lets you convert the OS boot type of a VM instance from Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) to Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI). This option is useful when you want to securely boot your VM instance, as secure boot is only supported by UEFI. For more information, see the table in Configure the target for a migrated VM.

To participate in the preview of this feature, send a request to the email address: [email protected].

Generally Available: Migrate to Virtual Machines supports migrating virtual machine instances (VMs) to Compute Engine 1st, 2nd, and 3rd generation machine series. For more information, see Support for Compute Engine machine series.

Preview: You can now use Customer-Managed Encryption Keys (CMEK) in Migrate to Virtual Machines to do the following:

• Protect data stored by Migrate to Virtual Machines during the migration process.
• Protect data of the migrated VMs created by clone and cut-over operations for all sources - AWS, Azure, and VMware.

Preview: Migrate to Virtual Machines now supports migrating VMs to the C3, H3, and M3 machine types. These machine types support non-volatile memory express (NVMe) and Google Virtual NIC (gVNIC). Before you migrate your VMs to any of these machine types, ensure that source VMs support NVMe and gVNIC. For more information on different machine types that support NVMe and gVNIC, go to the Machine series comparison section, click Choose VM properties to compare, and select Disk interface type and Network interfaces.

Generally Available: Migrate to Virtual Machines from an Azure source lets you migrate VM instances running on Azure to Google Cloud Compute Engine.

Preview: Migrate to Virtual Machines lets you migrate the disks of source virtual machine (VM) instances to Persistent Disk volumes on Google Cloud with the following options:

• Migrate the Persistent Disk volumes without attaching them to a VM instance
• Create a new VM instance and attach the migrated Persistent Disk volumes to it

Preview: Migrate to Virtual Machines from an Azure source is now open to all users. Migrate to Virtual Machines from an Azure source lets you migrate Azure VM instances to Compute Engine.

Preview: Migrate to Virtual Machines supports the migration of VMs running Amazon Linux 2 to Google Cloud as part of a preview program. In order to migrate a VM running Amazon Linux 2, Migrate to Virtual Machines first converts Amazon Linux 2 to Rocky Linux 8 and then completes the migration. To participate in the preview, contact us at [email protected].

Preview: Migrate to Virtual Machines lets you migrate disks from source virtual machine (VM) instances to Persistent Disk volumes on Google Cloud. This feature helps you migrate the workload state (VM disks) from a source VM and attach it as a Persistent Disk volume to a VM on Google Cloud, with minimal interruptions to the workload.

Generally Available: Migrate to Virtual Machines lets you migrate your VM instances running on Google Cloud VMware Engine to VM instances running on Compute Engine.

Migrate to Virtual Machines lets you set up throttling on the Migrate Connector to control the rate at which data is transferred from the Migrate Connector. Throttling ensures that the migration process distributes bandwidth evenly between the migration and any other tasks using the network. In this way, the migration can complete successfully without disrupting any other tasks.

Generally available: The Estimated cut-over time field is now generally available. This field gives an estimate of the time it takes to complete a cut-over job for a VM once the cut-over is triggered. This field is populated only for an active VM that has completed a few replication cycles.

Several updates to Migrate to Virtual Machines:

• Migrate to Virtual Machines is now available in regions europe-west12 and me-central1. For more information, see Migrate to Virtual Machines locations.
• Migrate to Virtual Machines now supports VMWare 8.0.
• Preview: Migrate to Virtual Machines introduces a new field, Estimated cut-over time, that gives an estimate of the time it takes to complete a cut-over job for a VM once the cut-over is triggered. This field is populated only for an active VM that has completed a few replication cycles.

Preview: Migrate to Virtual Machines from an Azure source lets you migrate Azure VM instances to Compute Engine.

Generally available: Migrate to Virtual Machines from an AWS source lets you migrate AWS EC2 instances to Compute Engine.

The maximum amount of active VMs has been increased from 100 to 200 VMs.

Migrate for Compute Engine allows you to employ a VPC-SC service perimeter and communicate with select services using your migrate connector.

For more information about using a VPC-SC perimeter, see the secure your migrations in a service perimeter documentation.

Migrate VMs using UEFI firmware. Using UEFI firmware you can enable Secure Boot migration details.

Migrate for Computer Engine now supports the configuration of multiple network interfaces to migrated VMs.

Migrate for Compute Engine now supports the deployment of migrated workloads to sole-tenant nodes. A sole-tenant node is a Compute Engine server that is dedicated to hosting only your project's VMs.

See Migrating individual VMs for more information on sole tenancy.

Added support for overriding the default license type to explicitly specify a license type of PAYG or BYOL.

See Configuring the target for a migrated VM for more information.

Google Cloud Console UI

End-to-end migration experience in Google Cloud Console including: Dashboard, Source inventory, Migrations managements, VM groups, and Targets.

To access the UI:

1. Open the Migrate for Compute Engine page in the Google Cloud Console.

2. In the upper-right corner, select Try the new version to open the Google Cloud Console to the 5.0 UI.

Migration primitives

Migration primitives controlling VM migration journey, which includes:

• Replication - Initiate replication based migration, control periodical replication cycle schedule.

• Test-Clone - Test a clone of migrating VM in Google Cloud with no disruptions on source VM to reduce migration risk.

• Cut-Over - Cutting over to Google Cloud process with minimized downtime to migrating VM.

See VM Migration lifecycle for more.

VM groups

Group migration operations to enable you to manage and execute mass migration sprints.

See Mass migration with groups for more.

Seamless OS adaptation

Seamless OS adaptation of migrating VMs to prepare OS to run in Compute Engine (such as network settings) and deploy Compute Engine agents for seamless day 2 integrations with Compute Engine services.

See Adapting VMs to run on Google Cloud for more.

Compute Engine Targets

Migration to n Google Cloud target projects and flexible configuration of migrating VM target details (such as instance type, disk type, and network settings).

See Configuring the target for a migrated VM for more.

vSphere Source

Agentless migration of vSphere source environment utilizing Migrate Connector appliance deployed in source.

See On-premises VMware to Compute Engine migrations for more.

VM utilization reports

To help you determine the optimal settings for the Compute Engine target, Migrate for Compute Engine lets you create a source VM utilization report. This report displays information about resource allocation and utilization for the source VMs deployed on vCenter.

See Creating a source VM utilization report for more.