Question

A company is migrating 40 physical Linux servers from a datacenter to AWS. Most servers run standard distributions supported by the AWS Application Migration Service (MGN) replication agent, but 6 servers run a hardened, proprietary appliance OS that does not allow installing third-party agents and cannot be modified. The company needs to migrate all servers with minimal application changes and the shortest possible cutover downtime. Which approach best handles the 6 unmodifiable appliance servers?

Accepted Answer

Export each appliance server to a virtual machine image, upload the images to Amazon S3, and use VM Import/Export to create AMIs that can be launched as EC2 instances.

Answer

Install the MGN agent in a privileged container on each appliance and continue block-level replication as with the other servers.

Answer

Use AWS DMS to replicate the appliance servers' operating systems and applications into EC2 instances.

Answer

Rebuild the 6 appliances from scratch on native AWS services using a repurchase (SaaS) strategy.