In many ways, there is no single requirement for a solution provider or customer to choose a particular combination of tools, whether VMware or third-party. VMware recommends using a Center of Excellence (COE) within the VMware Cloud Provider Program partner circle, a system integrator, or anyone who wants to own this concept of migration to the cloud for their customers, whether they are internal or external. The migration COE must be replete with potential migration use cases and adopted core service provider architectures presented within the vCAT-SP. The top-level migration use cases are P2V (physical-to-virtual), V2V (virtual-to-virtual), V2C (virtualization-to-cloud), and C2C (cloud-to-cloud).

Due to the varied combinations of tools available, this document provides a list of attributes for evaluating possibilities with the understanding that VMware customers, VMware service providers and their partners, as well as VMware itself will have differing recommendations depending on criteria. Within the VMware network of larger service provider partners, many permutations of a migration COE might exist. These permutations are used to best fit the potential combinations of tools, customers, partners, application types and so on, better enabling them to effectively “digest” the massive potential that is the coming years’ migration to the cloud. In the following figure, the migration COE is made up of the people, processes and technologies involved in the migration of customer workloads to the cloud.