**The Benefits of Migrating to VMware with the Architecture Migration Tool**

VMware has recently released an architecture migration tool that can help simplify the process of migrating machines from one platform to another. This tool is designed to make it easier to migrate machines from Intel-based systems to AMD-based systems, and can be especially useful for organizations looking to upgrade their hardware or switch to a new operating system.

One of the key benefits of using this tool is its ability to provide a seamless migration experience. The tool will automatically detect the state of the machine as it goes through the migration process, and will even hold the VM until the guest tools have been fully reinstalled and verified that they're there in the guest operating system before allowing the virtual machine to access the network or become online again. This can be a huge advantage for organizations that need to ensure that their machines are up and running smoothly after a migration.

The tool also provides a facility for doing validation that the transfer has completed successfully, and will even roll back if something doesn't go right. This means that organizations can be confident that their migrations have been successful, and can avoid the risk of data loss or system downtime. The tool is also designed to work with the distributed resource scheduler, which means that it's easy to integrate into existing clusters.

In addition to its ease of use, the Architecture Migration Tool also provides a full logging facility, which means that organizations can see exactly what's happening during the migration process. This can be especially useful for large migrations, where it's often difficult to keep track of the progress. The tool will log every step of the way, so that organizations can review the logs and make sure everything is working as expected.

For organizations with a lot of machines to migrate, there may be times when manual intervention is necessary. In this case, the Architecture Migration Tool can be configured to take a CSV list of machines, which means that organizations can automate the migration process and save time and effort. The tool will also verify that each machine has come up correctly before marking it as online again.

The tool uses snapshots to speed up migrations, and can even help with pruning and cleaning up later on. This is especially useful for large-scale migrations, where there may be a lot of machines to manage. The fact that the tool uses snapshots means that organizations can take advantage of this feature to simplify the migration process.

**Integration with Existing Clusters**

One of the things that's worth noting about the Architecture Migration Tool is its ability to integrate with existing clusters. This means that organizations can use the tool to migrate machines from one platform to another, without having to worry about disrupting their existing infrastructure. The tool will work seamlessly with existing clusters, and can even be used in conjunction with the distributed resource scheduler.

This means that organizations can keep using their existing tools and processes, while still benefiting from the advantages of the Architecture Migration Tool. For example, if an organization is running a PostgreSQL database cluster on one of its machines, and it's been upgraded to use a new architecture, the tool will still work with the rules in place for the cluster, even though the machine has changed. This means that organizations can keep their existing configurations in place, while still benefiting from the advantages of the Architecture Migration Tool.

**Conclusion**

Overall, the Architecture Migration Tool is a powerful and useful addition to any VMware migration process. Its ability to provide a seamless migration experience, its full logging facility, and its integration with existing clusters make it an attractive option for organizations looking to upgrade their hardware or switch to a new operating system. Whether you're doing a small-scale migration or a large-scale rollout, the Architecture Migration Tool is definitely worth considering. With its ease of use, automated verification, and ability to handle large-scale migrations, this tool has the potential to revolutionize the way we think about machine migrations.

**The Role of Splunk**

One of the things that's worth noting about the Architecture Migration Tool is its integration with logging tools like Splunk. This means that organizations can use the tool in conjunction with their existing log analysis tools, to get a better understanding of what's happening during the migration process. The tool will log every step of the way, so that organizations can review the logs and make sure everything is working as expected.

This integration with Splunk means that organizations can take advantage of the full capabilities of the logging tool, to analyze and troubleshoot any issues that may arise during the migration process. With the ability to log every step of the way, organizations can use Splunk to get a detailed view of what's happening, and make adjustments as needed.

**Limitations of Live Migration**

One thing worth noting is that this tool is not designed for live migrations. While it's possible to do live migrations in certain circumstances, Broadcom does not support or sanction it. This means that organizations will need to plan their migrations carefully, using the offline migration process described above.

However, even though live migrations are not supported, the Architecture Migration Tool can still be used in conjunction with other tools and processes to simplify the migration experience. For example, if an organization is running a PostgreSQL database cluster on one of its machines, and it's been upgraded to use a new architecture, the tool will still work with the rules in place for the cluster.

In summary, while live migrations are not supported by the Architecture Migration Tool, this doesn't mean that they can't be done at all. With careful planning and coordination, organizations can still achieve their migration goals using offline migrations or other tools and processes.

**Conclusion**

The Architecture Migration Tool is a powerful and useful addition to any VMware migration process. Its ability to provide a seamless migration experience, its full logging facility, and its integration with existing clusters make it an attractive option for organizations looking to upgrade their hardware or switch to a new operating system. Whether you're doing a small-scale migration or a large-scale rollout, the Architecture Migration Tool is definitely worth considering. With its ease of use, automated verification, and ability to handle large-scale migrations, this tool has the potential to revolutionize the way we think about machine migrations.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enI have some fantastic news AMD has new tools for VMware migration from old Intel clusters to new AMD machines this is the super micro 2125 hsnr it's a two socket platform 1.5 terabytes of memory which sounds like a lot but that's actually only 64 gig dims which are the affordable dim we're getting a 9:1 consolidation ratio using this platform consolidating older sky SK Lake era and older zons like Skylake Broadwell even older than Broadwell onto this platform thanks to these new AMD tools let's let's get out of here and take a closer look Ah that's better always wear hearing protection uh don't actually get to run the cameras in like the real data center that's just the experimental area but VMware can't live with it can't live without it am I right or am I right ah you know what I'm talking about no 8:1 9:1 consolidation ratios is that really really what we're looking at I mean we're in the precipice of amd's Next Generation CPU being released Turin and Intel with their own offerings which I have unprecedented density options 64 cores 128 cores 192 cores that's unheard heard of is it reasonable to expect that you could do five six 8 to one consolidation Well yeah if your your equipment is old enough sure but if you're a VMware administrator uh things like that make you a little nervous because how do you add another machine to the cluster if you got one of the Dell cluster in the Box Solutions it's not as easy as enrolling a new machine into the cluster and then just doing a live migration I mean that would certainly be the most convenient thing because you could just add a machine and do the migration but there's a lot of things about that that broadcom frowns upon or that are outright not supported in the VMR ecosystem the big one here is cross architecture if you're running a VMware cluster broadcom really wants you to have all of your Hardware to be as homogeneous as possible and really only specific configurations have actually been validated and supported and if you start going cowboy and wild west with Enterprise gear let's frowned upon and if it doesn't go exactly according to plan you're going to get fired which is why I'm happy to say that AMD for their part has worked directly with broadcom to get their blessings on VMware extensions you can't just go wild west not even Intel or AMD themselves can go wild west with extensions to VMware and so you you have to get broadcom sign off you have to do the validation you have to do all the testing and that's where all the cost comes in well AMD has done exactly that they provide migration tools now that as of the first part of 2024 this wasn't on my radar but I actually got a chance to take these for a spin recently uh that ease the migration give you some tools where you can schedule downtime in migration but you can also do throttling to configure it they call it vamped not to be confused with the old Saturday Night Live clip where I think Mike Myers was vamped but VT now in addition to giving you fine grain control over how it does the migration you can actually throttle the network interface and choose uh what order things are migrated in which is not often straightforward in vmware's default interface for dealing with that kind of thing but it also provides a facility for doing validation that the transfer has completed successfully and will even hold the VM until the guest tools have been fully reinstalled and verified that they're there in the guest operating system before allowing the virtual machine to access the network or to become you know online again or you know whatever your particular situation requires which is kind of huge and if the unforeseen happens something doesn't go right there's also roll back so if you've got your old cluster and you've got a new machine with a new architecture in the cluster and you're doing an offline migration of the VM and in the process you boot up the old VM on the new hardware and something doesn't exactly go according to plan you can roll back and that's part of the tool the tool will give you the facility to do that getting the software set up is pretty easy you will have to download the architecture migration tool directly the migration process uses tags to keep track of the state of the machine as it goes through the migration ation process and that is something you can quickly and easily see from VMware vsphere in case you're wondering this does work with the distributed resource scheduler so if that's part of your V Center setup that's going to drop right in with this you got to make sure that that's actually running and you you're using it in your cluster but if you're worried about that you're you're probably already there and there's a full logging facility so anything that you have that ties in with Cy log so like if you're using Splunk or something like that this tool will also log all of the steps of every step of the way through the migration process to CIS log and you can use your log analysis tools to keep track of it if you have a ton of machines to migrate and you'd prefer something that's even more automated you can give the VMT tool a CSV so you can do your machine migrations that way as well so even if you have hundreds or thousands of machines to migrate and manage you can use the tool to you know migrate a CSV list of machines but also verify that they came up correctly before marking them as online again so that's pretty handy I was also happy to see that these tools make use of snapshots and the snapshots are something you'll have to worry about in terms of pruning and cleaning up later there are some facilities in the tool to help you do that but the fact that it uses snapshots will speed migration it will also help you a ton in case anything goes sideways or anything doesn't go according to plan now it would be amazing if we could do live migrations but that is not something broadcom supports or sanctions so this is an offline migration but if you're running let's say a postgressql database cluster that's uh you know five nodes and you've got the rules set up so that the members of the post SQL cluster are always on different physical hosts in your VMR cluster those rules will still apply so when you do a migration and you shut down one of the members of your cluster there's still enough members there to be a quorum and then once the migration has completed and the verification step happens and it boots up and the guest tools are updated for the new platform etc etc then the machine can be added back to the cluster now there may be wrinkles there because like on I think Microsoft SQL Server it doesn't want you to run the cluster on differing architectures or at least it didn't I don't know if that's okay in 2024 that's probably something I should ask Glenn Barry in practice I've never really run into it as a problem um with poster SQL that's something I accidentally discovered uh after an Amazon upgrade it's like oh they've changed the CPU architecture at this price point and I didn't realize that the automation that would automatically scale up and down the cluster that's what you get for not using their database service right you should be running you know one of Amazon's like RDS or something you shouldn't be trying to roll your own that's just crazy that's a conversation for another day but here what we have with a beautiful partnership between AMD and VMware we have some actually useful tools that are useful for migration so if you're into that if you're doing your VMware migration or you moving from you know an Intel to an AMD epic platform check out the tool click the link read the blog post see what you think let me know what questions you have or if you want to see a demo or a walkthrough or something like that that cuz yeah those so those uh those Skylake airons they're not getting any younger it might be a ticking Time Bomb of uh threat just saying I'm M level one I'm signing out you can find me in the level one forumsI have some fantastic news AMD has new tools for VMware migration from old Intel clusters to new AMD machines this is the super micro 2125 hsnr it's a two socket platform 1.5 terabytes of memory which sounds like a lot but that's actually only 64 gig dims which are the affordable dim we're getting a 9:1 consolidation ratio using this platform consolidating older sky SK Lake era and older zons like Skylake Broadwell even older than Broadwell onto this platform thanks to these new AMD tools let's let's get out of here and take a closer look Ah that's better always wear hearing protection uh don't actually get to run the cameras in like the real data center that's just the experimental area but VMware can't live with it can't live without it am I right or am I right ah you know what I'm talking about no 8:1 9:1 consolidation ratios is that really really what we're looking at I mean we're in the precipice of amd's Next Generation CPU being released Turin and Intel with their own offerings which I have unprecedented density options 64 cores 128 cores 192 cores that's unheard heard of is it reasonable to expect that you could do five six 8 to one consolidation Well yeah if your your equipment is old enough sure but if you're a VMware administrator uh things like that make you a little nervous because how do you add another machine to the cluster if you got one of the Dell cluster in the Box Solutions it's not as easy as enrolling a new machine into the cluster and then just doing a live migration I mean that would certainly be the most convenient thing because you could just add a machine and do the migration but there's a lot of things about that that broadcom frowns upon or that are outright not supported in the VMR ecosystem the big one here is cross architecture if you're running a VMware cluster broadcom really wants you to have all of your Hardware to be as homogeneous as possible and really only specific configurations have actually been validated and supported and if you start going cowboy and wild west with Enterprise gear let's frowned upon and if it doesn't go exactly according to plan you're going to get fired which is why I'm happy to say that AMD for their part has worked directly with broadcom to get their blessings on VMware extensions you can't just go wild west not even Intel or AMD themselves can go wild west with extensions to VMware and so you you have to get broadcom sign off you have to do the validation you have to do all the testing and that's where all the cost comes in well AMD has done exactly that they provide migration tools now that as of the first part of 2024 this wasn't on my radar but I actually got a chance to take these for a spin recently uh that ease the migration give you some tools where you can schedule downtime in migration but you can also do throttling to configure it they call it vamped not to be confused with the old Saturday Night Live clip where I think Mike Myers was vamped but VT now in addition to giving you fine grain control over how it does the migration you can actually throttle the network interface and choose uh what order things are migrated in which is not often straightforward in vmware's default interface for dealing with that kind of thing but it also provides a facility for doing validation that the transfer has completed successfully and will even hold the VM until the guest tools have been fully reinstalled and verified that they're there in the guest operating system before allowing the virtual machine to access the network or to become you know online again or you know whatever your particular situation requires which is kind of huge and if the unforeseen happens something doesn't go right there's also roll back so if you've got your old cluster and you've got a new machine with a new architecture in the cluster and you're doing an offline migration of the VM and in the process you boot up the old VM on the new hardware and something doesn't exactly go according to plan you can roll back and that's part of the tool the tool will give you the facility to do that getting the software set up is pretty easy you will have to download the architecture migration tool directly the migration process uses tags to keep track of the state of the machine as it goes through the migration ation process and that is something you can quickly and easily see from VMware vsphere in case you're wondering this does work with the distributed resource scheduler so if that's part of your V Center setup that's going to drop right in with this you got to make sure that that's actually running and you you're using it in your cluster but if you're worried about that you're you're probably already there and there's a full logging facility so anything that you have that ties in with Cy log so like if you're using Splunk or something like that this tool will also log all of the steps of every step of the way through the migration process to CIS log and you can use your log analysis tools to keep track of it if you have a ton of machines to migrate and you'd prefer something that's even more automated you can give the VMT tool a CSV so you can do your machine migrations that way as well so even if you have hundreds or thousands of machines to migrate and manage you can use the tool to you know migrate a CSV list of machines but also verify that they came up correctly before marking them as online again so that's pretty handy I was also happy to see that these tools make use of snapshots and the snapshots are something you'll have to worry about in terms of pruning and cleaning up later there are some facilities in the tool to help you do that but the fact that it uses snapshots will speed migration it will also help you a ton in case anything goes sideways or anything doesn't go according to plan now it would be amazing if we could do live migrations but that is not something broadcom supports or sanctions so this is an offline migration but if you're running let's say a postgressql database cluster that's uh you know five nodes and you've got the rules set up so that the members of the post SQL cluster are always on different physical hosts in your VMR cluster those rules will still apply so when you do a migration and you shut down one of the members of your cluster there's still enough members there to be a quorum and then once the migration has completed and the verification step happens and it boots up and the guest tools are updated for the new platform etc etc then the machine can be added back to the cluster now there may be wrinkles there because like on I think Microsoft SQL Server it doesn't want you to run the cluster on differing architectures or at least it didn't I don't know if that's okay in 2024 that's probably something I should ask Glenn Barry in practice I've never really run into it as a problem um with poster SQL that's something I accidentally discovered uh after an Amazon upgrade it's like oh they've changed the CPU architecture at this price point and I didn't realize that the automation that would automatically scale up and down the cluster that's what you get for not using their database service right you should be running you know one of Amazon's like RDS or something you shouldn't be trying to roll your own that's just crazy that's a conversation for another day but here what we have with a beautiful partnership between AMD and VMware we have some actually useful tools that are useful for migration so if you're into that if you're doing your VMware migration or you moving from you know an Intel to an AMD epic platform check out the tool click the link read the blog post see what you think let me know what questions you have or if you want to see a demo or a walkthrough or something like that that cuz yeah those so those uh those Skylake airons they're not getting any younger it might be a ticking Time Bomb of uh threat just saying I'm M level one I'm signing out you can find me in the level one forums\n"