The development of technology and the impact of the new crown have made the market competition more and more fierce. Although cloud computing services save enterprises from the construction and maintenance costs of basic hardware, when enterprises need to perform cloud migration in scenarios such as business cross-frame adjustment, upgrade and maintenance, and environment testing, the downtime brought during the process becomes Especially a headache.
In the past, enterprises often relied on cold migration to migrate. It is necessary to stop the business and perform the migration after the host is powered off. This method is still feasible in cloud migration scenarios, but it is not applicable.
This is because the accelerated pace of business makes customers have higher and higher requirements for business continuity. In order to meet user experience, enterprises are less and less tolerant of business downtime. In addition, due to their characteristics, industries such as finance and medical care have very strict requirements for downtime. The emergence of hot migration technology has helped enterprises solve the problem of long downtime. First of all, to correct a misunderstanding of business owners:
Downtime Window ≠ Breaking Business Continuity
Hot migration, also called live migration, is a mechanism for migrating data/hosts from the source to the target without interrupting business services. "Uninterrupted" here means that the business has been providing services in terms of user perception. In fact, during the hot migration process, there will be a short downtime window.
In fact, hot migration is the process of transferring internally stored data. The source end continuously transfers data to the target end until only part of the memory that can be transferred at one time remains untransmitted at the source end. At this time, the source end host is suspended and the last part of data is transferred to the target end. This is because, when transferring data, the source-end host business may provide services related to memory writing and generate new memory that has not been migrated. This is the so-called "dirty memory". If the source-end host is not suspended, "Dirty memory" is generated all the time, and the migration can never be completed.
Most of the hot migration technologies on the market today cannot avoid the downtime window problem during the migration process.
Types of Thermal Migration
1. Live migration within a virtual machine cluster
VMware first entered this field in 2005 through VMotion (virtual machine migration agent) and virtual center management software (Virtual Center management).
Although Vmotion can achieve seamless migration, it has extremely high restrictions on the source and destination, and when the entire cluster fails, it will be difficult to guarantee the continuity of enterprise data and business.
2. Cross-platform and cross-architecture hot migration
Due to various reasons, many enterprises have begun to adopt multi-cloud/hybrid cloud business architecture, and the hot migration technology in the virtual machine cluster cannot meet the needs of enterprises in this scenario.
If you want to complete cross-architecture and cross-platform hot migration, you need the help of third-party tools. This is because different physical machines, virtual machines, and clouds have different service providers. Their architectures, CPU types, etc. are all different, and it is impossible to complete cross-architecture and platform migration actions only by relying on the migration services of a single vendor.
Cloud-native-based whole machine hot migration to ensure business continuity
HyperMotion utilizes cloud-native features + full incremental replication technology to efficiently implement hot migration across clouds, architectures, and platforms.
Cloud-native API docking supports multiple scenarios:
Directly call the cloud API interface to independently realize cloud startup, intelligently drive and adapt to 20 clouds and 40+ cloud versions; realize highly automated orchestration capabilities, meet the repeated verification requirements before going to the cloud, and ensure service-level availability after going to the cloud.
Enterprises can use HyperMotion cloud migration to realize the migration of various business scenarios according to their needs. In addition to cloud/virtualization migration, it also includes traditional IDC physical machine to cloud or virtual machine, cloud to traditional IDC and other migration scenarios, data migration Smoother and more convenient to operate.
Full incremental replication technology:
After the migration starts, first use the block-level full copy technology to quickly copy all the data at the source end to the target end without stopping the business;
After the full copy is completed, the enterprise can customize the snapshot interval of incremental copy. When the business is running normally, the new data generated will be copied to the target end continuously, and the downtime window will be narrowed by means of small incremental synchronization.
During the process of full incremental replication, the source end business always runs normally.
Boot in Cloud technology, one-click start-up business:
When almost all the data is migrated to the target end, the enterprise can customize the business cutover time according to actual needs, such as setting the downtime window during non-business hours. Stop the source-end business before the business cutover, and use the Boot in Cloud technology to pull up the target-end business with one click after the last incremental replication. The shortest can reach minute-level RTO.
Multi-cloud/hybrid cloud deployment has become a popular deployment trend at present. Without disrupting business continuity, almost all live migration technologies need to optimize the process, such as: small incremental synchronization before business cutover to reduce business interruption time, Allow enterprises to complete business cutover during non-business running hours to reduce the impact on the production side. Coupled with the help of HyperMotion cloud migration, it helps enterprises make full use of cloud-native features, break through complex architecture and platform restrictions, and freely migrate on, in, and off the cloud. Highly automated design reduces cost burden, improves migration success rate, and allows data to flow more freely across architectures and platforms.
