AWS Server Migration Service

What do you like best?

There is no re-architecting involved. Simply install the appliance in your virtual environment, get a encryption key (optional, ideal for sharing ami to other aws accounts), and launch your ami.

What do you dislike?

It wasnt very transparent to us that compression prevents more than 2TB machines to be migrated. If you need to migrate a system that is more than 2TB then you must disable compression. Also, when migrating something on a Microsoft AD Domain, you have to quarantine the box, remove from domain/change name, rejoin to domain with new name or you will get some errors for object collisions on your AD.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We have legacy products that even our developers are unable to determine dependencies of/for. With SMS, we have been able to lift and shift these boxes without having to re-architect them. Which was huge since we were running out of time on our datacenter.