Here at cloudstep, we love to help our customers achieve their goals. We believe that the cloud is a tool in the toolbox and we can use that multi-facet tool to help our customers realise success. Planning for success starts with goals, and goals come in many different shapes and sizes.
For any given solution, a customers goal may be focused on achieving financial or competitive advantage. Alternatively, they may be looking to realise operational efficiency by improving a day-to-day process using automation and orchestration. No matter your goal, you need a solid plan to ensure success. More often than not, that starts with validating that you have a sound understanding of the current state environment which will enable you to move forward towards achieving your goals.
Today I want to talk about a capability provided as part of the Migration Hub offering in AWS, the Application Discovery Service. This is a tool that we regularly use and encounter when meeting with customers. The core idea behind this capability (aptly named) is to help you discover critical details about your environment. This includes performance metrics and resource utilisation data which can be used for cost modelling, in our case… cloudstep.io. The tooling can also gather detailed network metrics to help you better understand the integrations and interfaces between applications in your environment. All of this data is at your disposal once you have decided upon which deployment model you would like to utilise.
AWS offer both an Agentless Discovery service and an Agent Based discovery service. Ordinarily, we typically use the Agentless discovery service. This is a great approach for organisations that operate entirely virtualised VMware infrastructure. Using this approach allows you to quickly inventory each of your VM’s that reside within your vCenter without the requirement of installing an agent on each guest VM. Choosing this path means that the agentless discovery service will query the VMware vCenter for performance metrics (irrespective of which OS the guest is running.) It can’t actually reach inside the virtual machine, therefore it is dependent on having a compatible version of the “VMware Tools” running inside each VM.
If you have a mixture of Physical and Virtual servers in your fleet, or you run another Hypervisor (such as Hyper-V) you may need to consider the Agent based deployment model. This approach is generally considered more labour intensive to get up and running due to the requirement to get hands on with each server. There are also some constraints around which OS’s it can fetch data from. So be mindful of this. You may even find that the best approach is to run a mix of the two deployment models. The outcome of both approaches is a series of performance data metrics which is shipped outbound using HTTPS to an S3 bucket. This bucket can then be queried by the AWS Migration Hub service. Alternatively you can export the data and analyse it using tooling of your choice.
For the remainder of the article, I will focus on our experience with the Agentless discovery approach. As I mentioned earlier, this is our preferred approach because it takes about an hour to get up and running and it generally produces more than enough quality data. In our experience, this provides an excellent baseline for commencing our cloudstep.io cost modelling engagement.
The AWS Agentless discovery connector operates as a VMware appliance within your vCenter environment. AWS provide a pre-canned OVA file which is around 2GB in size. You simply deploy this, the same way you would with any other open virtualisation archive. If you run multiple vCenters for different physical locations, you will need to deploy multiple instances of the appliance to service each stack.
If you experience issues deploying the OVA image within VMware, review my other blog – here
Deploying these appliances in enterprise environments often presents unique challenges. In our experience, this is where customers tend to have issues. Sometimes they deploy the appliances to management networks which don’t provide DHCP so they need to manually bind IP addresses, or there may be firewall rules which prevent connections from an access layer switch to perform the configuration process. The appliance does offer a terminal console (sudo setup.rb) where you can configure foundation services such as IP configs and DNS servers.
Another consideration you should make is “How will my appliance get outbound access to the internet?” After all, its sole purpose is to ship data outbound using HTTPS to an AWS S3 bucket via the Migration Hub. From a firewalling perspective, this is usually quite nice as outbound TCP443 generally doesn’t warrant a discussion with your security team. However, should your security team raise concern about corporate data being shipped off to the internet, AWS provide a detailed article on exactly what information is collected – here.
A final consideration you should make is proxy servers. If you utilise upstream proxy servers to police internet access, consider any rules you may need to define here. Typically speaking, the appliance will run headless in a “SYSTEM” context so you may need to allow it unauthenticated outbound internet access. Take a moment to think through any pitfalls you may encounter and also consider how you intend on interfacing with the appliance.
Once you have deployed your shiny new VM, you can fire up a web browser and configure it using the native web interface ( http://127.0.0.1 ) There are two things you will need:
- Read-only credentials to the vCenter you will inventory.
- AWS IAM Credentials to authenticate to the Migration Hub service.
Once you have completed the wizard, you will be greeted with a summary screen that presents instance specific configuration such as the appliances AWS connector ID.
The final step in the process is to to start the data collection process. You can action this by making API calls using the AWS CLI
aws discovery start-data-collection-by-agent-ids –agent-ids <connector ID>
Alternatively, you can also navigate to the Migration Hub console and manually approve the data collection process. If you have more than one appliance, you will have multiple connector ID’s registered here. You can validate that these line up by browsing to the appliance web interface where it will list its respective connector ID. The service polls the vCenter environment every 60 minutes, therefore it is reasonable to expect that you should be able to query your data within the AWS migration hub within an hour or two assuming everything is functioning as expected. Alternatively you can export the collected data to a CSV to commence your migration analysis.
In this blog I have explored the Application Discovery Service which is a capability provided by AWS’ Migration Hub. We have talked through common pitfalls that customers often experience when working with the agentless discovery service in effort to simply the deployment process. The data collected provides powerful insights into your environment which is crucial to success when planning a cloud migration. Should you need further assistance, do not hesitate to reach out to the team at cloudstep.io. We’d love to hear from you, and to help you on the road to success
To the cloud!
