Migration & DR for Amazon

Web Services with the

RackWare Management
Module
White Paper Author
Zach Peters

WHITE PAPER
2014 RackWare Inc., LLC All Rights Reserved

November 6, 2014

2014 RackWare Inc., LLC All Rights Reserved

Contents
Use of AWS within Enterprises today ........................................................................................................... 4
How Enterprises can Leverage AWS as an Extension of their Internal Environments ............................. 4
AWS and RackWare Use Cases ..................................................................................................................... 4
1. Migration to AWS.................................................................................................................................. 4
2. Hybrid Elastic scaling into AWS ............................................................................................................. 4
3. Cloud DR to AWS ................................................................................................................................... 4
Rackware Features .................................................................................................................................... 4
integration with AWS feature ................................................................................................................... 4
Benefits ..................................................................................................................................................... 4
Customer Example: Company A.................................................................................................................... 5
Application Architecture ........................................................................................................................... 5
Motivation for Migration .......................................................................................................................... 5
Use Case 1 - RackWares AWS Migration Plan, Strategy, & Execution Steps for Company A ...................... 6
Cloud Assessment ..................................................................................................................................... 6
Discovery ................................................................................................................................................... 6
Capture...................................................................................................................................................... 7
Cloud Onboarding ..................................................................................................................................... 7
Assigning ................................................................................................................................................... 7
Replication and Sync ................................................................................................................................. 8
Phased Migration ...................................................................................................................................... 8
Cut Over .................................................................................................................................................... 8
Use Case 2 - RackWares Hybrid Elastic Scaling with AWS ........................................................................... 8
Use Case 3 - RackWares DR to AWS............................................................................................................. 9
Summary ..................................................................................................................................................... 11
Conclusion ................................................................................................................................................... 11

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Use of AWS within Enterprises today

AWS is the most popular public cloud today, with great ability to scale and tremendous
flexibility in pricing and configurations. While enterprises have begun to use AWS, they have
done so in small pockets in various departments. These use cases have typically been led by
developers but have not been part of a globally approved IT strategy.

How Enterprises can Leverage AWS as an Extension of their Internal

Environments
RackWare allows enterprises to harness the strengths of AWS with proven solutions for
migration, DR and hybrid scaling, allowing enterprises to move entire environments of modern
and legacy workloads to AWS. RackWare Management Module, RackWares flagship hybrid
cloud management product integrates with AWS features such as EC2, S3, VPC, EBS, Direct
Connect and AutoScaling, to provide enterprise-class DR, migration and hybrid cloud scaling.

AWS and RackWare Use Cases

USE CASES->

MIGRATION TO AWS

RACKWARE
FEATURES

Ability to migrate
any workload
modern or legacy to
AWS

INTEGRATION
WITH AWS
FEATURE
BENEFITS

HYBRID ELASTIC
SCALING INTO AWS
Auto-scaling into AWS
when internal capacity
is exceeded.

CLOUD DR TO AWS

Integrations with
Amazon EC2, S3 and
EBS

Integration with AWS

Autoscaling

Ability to protect any

workload modern or
legacy using AWS as a
secondary site with predefined RPO and RTO
Integration with AWS
Direct Connect

Migration steps
reduced from
hundreds to a few.
Migration time
reduced from several
weeks to a few
hours.

Enterprises can deploy

a truly hybrid scaling
solution where they can
burst into AWS with the
help of RackWares
auto-scaling, then scale
as needed within AWS.

Protection for cloud,

virtualized and legacy
apps in AWS, automated
state and data
synchronization, failure
detection, failover and
failback.

The use cases above will become clearer with the customer example below that highlights step
by step what the processes for cloud migration, DR and hybrid scaling to AWS are.

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About RackWare Management Module (RMM)

RMM is a software product that decouples the application stack from the underlying platform
allowing it to be ported to any new platform. RMM includes discovery, analysis and automation
features allowing the migration process to be fast, easy and error-free. Hundreds of customers
have moved thousands of workloads between platforms and between internal and cloud
environments using RMM. RMM also offers replication, sync and monitoring features that
permit cost-effective Cloud DR deployments.

Customer Example: Company A

Company A is a customer that with legacy onsite infrastructure and needs additional capacity
during peak utilization. Customer, partners and employees use the web application to
collaborate with each other using a mobile APIs and a rich web interface. As monthly sales are
announced, demands generates large amounts of traffic to the site resulting in latency in the
customers experience.

Application Architecture
Using a standard 3-tier application architecture, Company A deploys a frontend hardwarebased load balancer, which manages traffic across two Apache web servers. The application is
running behind a company firewall (DMZ) and uses standard SSL encryption. The backend
business logic is implemented in Java, and leverages Tomcat as the application container and
application server, and three Tomcat servers power the website. The application also has a
database layer which consists of one master MySQL server and a slave server for greater
performance.

Motivation for Migration

Company A would like to move the web app to the AWS environment for these reasons
1. The company wishes to scale out the web application, and address the growing traffic,
without investing in new hardware
2. They would like to deploy a secondary DR site in AWS for their 3-tier application
3. Finally, the company would like to expand and provision extra capacity only when its
needed, for example, when running monthly sales.

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Use Case 1 - RackWares AWS Migration Plan, Strategy, & Execution Steps
for Company A
Cloud Assessment
During the technical assessment, RMM software discovered that the entire CompanyA.com
technology stack was compatible with AWS and could run in Amazons Cloud.

Figure 1

Discovery
The migration team ran RMMs agentless discovery services to map the relationships
CompanyA.com ecosystem between firewalls, load balancers, web servers, application servers
and MySQL DB. The dependence mapping was able to show ports as well as the number of
connections between tiers. RackWares RMM discovery engine was able to monitor
performance over time to make recommendations on target sizing.

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Capture
RMM has file capture technology, supporting Windows or Linux, application, web and DB x86
architectures, without an agent. The agentless live capture was achieved without taking the
workload off-line or installing software. RMM captured the complete operating system,
application stack and data in single or multiple images. During the capture, RMM removed all
source hardware dependences. By removing source dependences including network address
and hardware drivers, RMM allows the source workload to be migrated to any new target
environment.

Cloud Onboarding
RMM for AWS includes pre-built integrations with AWS to support automatically creating AWS
AMIs from the requirements gathered during the discovery of the target resources. RMM
gives users the option to modify the AMI prior to its creation. The automation removes all
manual steps with creating an Amazon shell AMI prior to migrations. Rackware can inherit the
target network addresses during the Onboarding processing. Inheriting target networks
addresses allows for rapid transition into AWS VPC. RMMs instrumentation can build Amazon
Load Balancers and security groups from within the RMM interface.

Assigning
RMM is a point to point migration technology. The technology only requires a single
configurable port to be used during migration. Once the target images have been assigned to
the AWS shell target, Rackware is able to overwrite the AMIs with the source Image. During
this overwrite RackWare is able to inject drives into the captured image and inherit target
network addresses. Rackware has pre and post plugins that can be executed to automate IPs

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connections AWS elastic load balances and automate adding host names to AWS directory
services.

Replication and Sync

RMM has a built in live replication and delta syncing technology with scheduling and policy
assignments. This will allow the target to remain running during the sync, with no disruption to
service. Individual sync policies enable users to setup sync for DB, application and web tiers on
distinctive schedules. The delta engine enable fast migration of only the changed files.
Additionally, users can granular select files of directory to select for sync or not to sync. Its
recommended to setup a sync policy to insure source and target at kept current.

Phased Migration
During the migration phase Company A has migrated copies of web and application to AWS.
Company A has a phased migration strategy. The configuration on premise hardware load
balancer was modified to send traffic to send request to the new instances in the cloud. After
verifying that the servers in the cloud were performing at required levels. The onsite servers
were dismissed one by one.

Cut Over
With the nightly sync policy the final cutover was accomplished in a short change window. This
change window can be live with the source web site still operational or can be taken off line.

Use Case 2 - RackWares Hybrid Elastic Scaling with AWS

RMMs scaling features allow an application to be automatically launched in AWS based on
meeting certain thresholds for example, maximum number of users exceeded. RMM also
integrates with AWSs autoscaling feature to allow application instances that have been moved
into AWs to scale up or down.
With the RMM and AWS autoscaling integration enterprises can get hybrid scaling burst out
into AWS when internal resources have been maxed and scale elastically within AWS based on
load.

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Use Case 3 - RackWares DR to AWS

Rackware provides a Disaster Recovery solution that builds on its Image mobility and elasticity
features to bring economic Disaster Recovery for the hybrid cloud. The origin Host Image can
reside in remote storage (at the origin site) or on the local disk. If the Image resides on the local
disk, the RMM configures the Logical Volume Manager (LVM) on the Host and is used to take
periodic snapshots of the Image. If the Image resides remotely, LVM is not required, and a
snapshot operation is executed on the Image via the storage array management interface. In
the background, an Image sync operation synchronizes any changes in the Image with the
Image at the DR site. The overhead on the origin Host is extremely small involving only
resources to take a delta snapshot. Thus the data overhead of the WAN link incurs only the
delta of information, keeping bandwidth needs and sync time to a minimum. Its important
that Image updates include user data, Operating System updates, and application installations
and configuration changes so that the recovery image behaves exactly like the production
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image should a failover occur. The cloud DR feature supports all of these. While OS updates are
more infrequent it is still important to ensure that kernel patches are kept in sync with the DR
Image. When updating the OS, an image refresh operation is done from the RMM first before
the sync to the AWS CloudImage. Should the product system be compromised or inoperable,
the CloudImage is automatically launched and is running with the latest synchronized changes.

After the production instance is repaired and operational, its easy to restore the origin site
with any up to date changes made to the CloudImage in the cloud. When the origin site is
restored to its operational state, the administrator can utilize the capture from cloud feature to
refresh the original Image and synchronize any changes that occurred during the outage.

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Summary: AWS allows customers to migrate entire environments into their infrastructure.
RackWare allows these customers to build, configure and replicate these complex
environments easily and quickly. When these environments need to be customized, customers
can simply punch in those desired changes into the RMM tool during replication to allow
complex, yet customized migrations and expansions to occur.

Conclusion
By investing in RMM for AWS Company A was able to:

Successfully migrate an existing web application to the AWS cloud with zero downtime to their
current production environment and shaved weeks off their original manual schedule.
Set up an intelligent hybrid scaling deployment that automatically scales into the AWS when
traffic exceeds a pre-defined threshold.
Protect their crucial application using AWS as the secondary site at roughly 1/10th the price of
traditional DR solutions.

Using a phased approach, the development team was able to resolve all the financial, technical and
business concerns.

2014 RackWare Inc., LLC All Rights Reserved

About RackWare
RackWare allows enterprises to use the public cloud as just another resource for their internal
infrastructure for disaster recovery, as well as scaling purposes. With its unique ability to be platform
and cloud agnostic, RackWares flagship solution, the RackWare Management Module (RMM), allows
workloads to be ported between any platform, virtual or physical, and any cloud. RackWare has moved
thousands of workloads for hundreds of customers and has partnerships with large Service Providers and
VARs. RackWare was founded in 2009 and is based in Santa Clara, California. For more information, go
to: www.rackwareinc.com.
For more information on RMM for AWS visit http://www.rackwareinc.com/rackware-managementmodule-aws/ or email [email protected]

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