[PVE-User] Overwhelming Migration to EC2

[Alwin Antreich]

Hello John,

On Mon, Feb 18, 2019 at 12:23:42PM -0800, John C. Reid wrote:
> I have been using ProxMox to host our VMs for a couple of years now and I
> really like it. Unfortunately the last couple weeks have been an eye opener.
> We had a fire earlier this month and last week a storm caused power to be
> down for several days. Because of this we discovered that our Generator is
> shot as it was cycling between 56Hz and 64Hz causing surges of power. It
> killed my primary AC, a few managed switches, and a few other pieces of
> equipment. The crux of this being that management has made the decision that
> I need to migrate everything to Amazon AWS.
Ugh... really an admin's nightmare come true. From my perspective the
move to amazon seems like a rushed decision. I hope your DC is still
functioning to keep business running.

> 
> The vast majority of my VMs cannot be simply rebuilt in EC2. I need to be
> able to migrate them over using an export/import. It seems that Amazon has
> the ability to import from OVA, VMDK, VHD, and RAW but imports from RAW into
> EC2 fail if coming from KVM because of the kernel. It also seems that KVM
> has been left out in the cold when it comes to its existence being
> recognized by Amazon. I have found that anytime Amazon documentation fails
> to specifically say what hypervisor the export/import documentation is for,
> it is assumed to be VMWare. In short, it appears that I am going to have to
> use "qemu-img convert" to convert my VMs to VMWare  prior to attempting to
> import them.
> 
> My ProxMox server is currently hosting 16 VM, all of the KVM/QEMU type,
> stored as RAW on Stripped Mirrored vDev ZPools (I have two separate pools
> attached as Primary Storage and Secondary Storage and the VMs are roughly
> split between them.) The OS itself is on a pair of mirrored SSDs in a
> hardware RAID 1. It has been running a dream, but as I said, I have to
> figure out how to get my VMs off of it and into EC2 instances.
A quick and dirty thing (more for testing) would be to mount a instance
and use rsync to move everything besides the kernel and other amazon
tooling.

Or move just the data part, if you are able to install the services from
scratch.

> 
> Does anybody have experience doing this? It is all a bit overwhelming. I
> could really use some help with a viable roadmap from somebody that has done
> this. At the same time I am trying to figure this out I am also doing
> several Hyper-V VMs, some physical machines, designing the VPC, and possibly
> moving a /24 of IP space to an IP pool in AWS. On that last one I am really
> scratching my head. I can't advertise the IPs here and at Amazon at the same
> time, the /24 is a subset in the middle of a /20 we own and advertise via
> BGP. Also the /24 I would be moving is in use by all of the servers (they
> want to migrate each IP with the server currently using it.) If all of that
> is not enough. It is just me -- I am the IT department. Thank you in advance
> for any help you can provide.
I don't know if amazon allows advanced network setups, like these in
general.

As you can already see, this major task is not a shot from the hip and I
believe needs more preparation and planing, as your time permits, I
guess.

With already all the hassle you mentioned, it seems that a move of your
infrastructure to amazon will certainly cost (time and money) more than
anticipated. As already mentioned by others, a dedicated hosting
provider that has a (or more) Proxmox based products in their portfolio
will easy the move considerably.

I suppose the end goal is to have two DC locations, so when disaster
strikes, business can still stay operational.

Just moving to "a" hosted DC will not diminish the possibility that also
the hosted DC faces outages/disasters. Holding your infrastructure in
one place while disaster strikes, will produce the same outcome. Or
simpler, they might just lose your data.

So in short, two locations (eg.  co-location) in general is key to
business continuity.

While I know I didn't provide a solution to your immediate problem. I
hope you can make your case succeed.

And in the end you only can learn from this, however the outcome. :)
--
Cheers,
Alwin