As previously mentioned, typically the first step in a migration is Discovery and Assessment. While there are many tools that can be used in this process, both VMware and third-party, this section discusses only VMware vRealize Infrastructure Navigator™. vRealize Infrastructure Navigator is a virtual appliance that you can deploy on VMware vCenter Server®. With the components of vRealize Infrastructure Navigator, you can map services running in your virtual environment, examine the application discovery status, view and analyze the dependency map, and have a centralized view of the entire application environment relative to vSphere. The following figure illustrates various components of vRealize Infrastructure Navigator and their dependencies.

 

While tools provided by VMware, such as Application Dependency Planner, can aid in Discovery and Assessment of applications running in physical and virtual environments, vRealize Infrastructure Navigator is used to provide similar capabilities within a vSphere virtual environment. Applications can certainly undergo migration from a physical environment to the cloud, but it is often a logical first step to perform a migration to a vSphere based virtual environment. This is because the SDDC platform that on-premises vSphere environments are comprised of is compatible with the SDDC used to implement VMware Cloud Provider environments. Having a hybrid approach to cloud architecture provides many benefits, some of which are described in this document. For this document’s purpose, the ability to prepare an application as a hybrid cloud migration candidate involves collecting adequate information about the application and its dependencies. vRealize Infrastructure Navigator is a great tool for doing just that.

Because vRealize Infrastructure Navigator supports the discovery of operating system and application components, including networking and the virtual machine hardware construct (which exposes the underlying components running in a virtual machine), a great deal of pertinent information can be gained by running applications on the SDDC. While not all applications have associated support within vRealize Infrastructure Navigator, many platforms used to build and deliver business applications are supported. The following figure provides an example of supported applications and forms the foundation for an initial analysis of components running in the SDDC and their dependencies to plan a migration for them. There are up-to-date spreadsheets on the product download page at https://my.vmware.com for operating systems and application components that are supported as well as the methods used by vRealize Infrastructure Navigator to perform discovery on virtual machines and their application-specific contents.

 

After the Discovery is complete (it perpetually discovers new/changed virtual machines, their components and dependencies), vRealize Infrastructure Navigator can be used for the Assessment phase. It supports this in a variety of ways starting with what are known as Application Definitions. Application Definitions allow administrators to group patterns of the ways in which services (ports and processes) are normally grouped together to essentially create boundaries around groups of servers. When matched to an Application Definition, virtual machines and their contents are mapped together in applications that show communication paths between them, direction, ports, and processes that support the communication. In the following figure, this collection is depicted in the VMware vSphere Web Client providing visual aids for assessing the application landscape.

vRealize Infrastructure Navigator is extensible in a few different ways. For one, tabular data for Application Definitions and Inventory can be exported to CSV. To make certain that you are not limited to the Application Definitions items shown in the previous two figures, there are user-defined services where a port and/or process can be provided. vRealize Infrastructure Navigator also collects information about dependency “peers,” whether they are virtual or physical, that are not located in the same vCenter Server realm. This information is rendered as a map of IP addresses and DNS names for the dependencies that interact with application VMs under the management of the vCenter Server associated with vRealize Infrastructure Navigator. Because of the extensions provided by vRealize Infrastructure Navigator to the metadata within the Inventory Service, as shown in Figure 7, there are a number of enhanced use cases within the broader VMware vRealize Suite that are not covered in this document but can be found in other sections of the vCAT-SP as well as this VMware TAM Blog.