Lift-and-Shift, VMware, GCE and GCVE (Google Cloud Adoption Series)

DALL·E render of a physical host, spawning hundreds of baby VMs

Welcome to the continuation of the Google Cloud Adoption for the Enterprise, From Strategy to Operation series.

In the previous part, we looked at opportunities for linking your cloud strategy with data centre exit, mainframe exit, ZTNA adoption and your EUC strategy. In this installment, I’m going to give you a few pointers (and warnings!) about lift-and-shift.

So You’ve Got VMs?

Most enterprises with any significant amount of on-prem IT are running a server virtualisation platform. Probably one or some of:

• Microsoft Hyper-V, if your organisation predominantly runs applications on Windows.
• IBM PowerVM, if you have a lot of IBM Power/AIX.
• z/VM, if someone convinced you that running a hypervisor on a mainframe was a good idea.
• VMware — the market leader, and arguably the best and most complete offering.

(Yes, there are others, but I’m not going to go down that rabbit hole!)

And server virtualisation is great. It was a game changer! Virtualising your server estate gave you:

• Hardware consolidation through efficient pooling of resources.
• Reduced physical space…