This tutorial describes the best practices for migrating a VMware system from an on-premises or data center environment to an Alibaba Cloud Dedicated Host (DDH). A DDH provides dedicated hardware resources to meet security, compliance, custom deployment, and Bring Your Own License (BYOL) requirements. It also provides cloud benefits, such as resource elasticity and pay-as-you-go billing, to help you build a high-performance, reliable, and scalable virtualization system.
Solution advantages
A dedicated resource pool of high-performance, reliable, and elastic physical servers in the cloud.
A mature, cloud-native virtualization technology that supports custom deployment of ECS instances and migration between DDHs and multi-tenant environments.
Support for BYOL.
Deployment architecture diagram
Products used
Dedicated Host (DDH)
Dedicated Host (DDH) is an Alibaba Cloud solution that is customized and optimized for enterprise users. It provides dedicated physical resources, flexible deployment options, diverse configurations, and is highly cost-effective.
For more information, see What is a Dedicated Host (DDH)?.
Resource Access Management (RAM)
Resource Access Management (RAM) is an Alibaba Cloud service that manages user identities and resource access permissions.
For more information, see What is Resource Access Management.
Elastic Compute Service (ECS)
Elastic Compute Service (ECS) is a high-performance, stable, and scalable Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering from Alibaba Cloud. ECS eliminates the upfront cost of IT hardware and lets you provision and elastically scale servers on demand, similar to using a public utility. ECS continuously provides innovative server options to meet various business needs and help your business grow.
For more information, see What is ECS?.
Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
A Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) is an isolated network environment that you can create on Alibaba Cloud. You can customize its IP address range, CIDR blocks, route tables, and gateways. You can also connect the VPC to a traditional data center using leased lines, VPNs, or GRE tunnels to create a hybrid cloud.
For more information, see What is a VPC?.
Object Storage Service (OSS)
Alibaba Cloud Object Storage Service (OSS) is a secure, cost-effective, and highly reliable cloud storage service that provides massive storage capacity. It is designed for 99.9999999999% (twelve 9s) of data durability and 99.995% of service availability.
For more information, see What is OSS?.
Resource Orchestration Service (ROS)
Alibaba Cloud Resource Orchestration Service (ROS) is a simple and easy-to-use service that automates the deployment of cloud resources. You can use templates in JSON or YAML format to describe the configurations and dependencies of multiple cloud resources, such as ECS, RDS, and SLB. ROS then automatically deploys and configures all the specified resources across different regions and accounts. This lets you implement infrastructure as code.
For more information, see What is Resource Orchestration Service?.
Procedure
For detailed instructions about how to migrate a VMware system to a DDH, see Best practices.
More best practices
For more Alibaba Cloud best practices, see Alibaba Cloud Best Practices.