Altaro says administrators typically make one or more common mistakes when moving virtual machines (VMs) into the cloud.
In its regular online VMware dojo discussing its backup software for Hyper-V and VMware, Altaro‘s Luke Orellana highlights that, firstly, too many people try to mimick on-premise infrastructure in the cloud.
“Cloud infrastructure concepts are not the same as they are in the traditional on-premise environment,” he says.
“For example: high availability. Someone else is hosting the hardware now and that hardware will need to be updated and rebooted as a part of its operational maintenance. Because of this, most clouds recommend at least two VMs for applications that need to be highly available.”
Others fail to understand the cost model for cloud – sometimes not even implementing any sort of cost management policy. Later, they get slammed with a big bill, notes Orellana.
“In public cloud, paying for compute and storage is just like paying a utility bill. You leave the hose on, you get a big water bill at the end of the month. Companies now need to be mindful of what they are using in the cloud and ‘turn off’ as much as they can get away with.”
In addition, it can be an error to simply transfer VM workloads to an IaaS public cloud service, which is just storing them in someone else’s datacentre, typically costing even more money. Instead, customers should look to benefit from cloud, which means considering offerings other than IaaS – such as migrating SQL or web servers into PaaS.
“If PaaS is too limiting for your environment, take a look at containers. Many people don’t realize the cost savings on OS licensing when using containers,” says Orellana. “Speak with your vendors and see if they support running their application on Docker.“
Alternatives might included hosted VMware solutions on AWS or Azure that permit easy workload migrations to cloud with a VMware skillset.
Consider using consultants when necessary. Also, don’t rush, especially when it comes to multi-cloud, and don’t forget to consider the cost of bandwidth, Orellana adds.
“Just because you’ve been doing IT for 10 years doesn’t mean you can just run with it and build workloads in production securely without putting your company at risk,” he says.
