Question

A logistics company plans to migrate roughly 400 on-premises virtual machines to Google Cloud over the next year. Leadership demands a data-driven business case that quantifies total cost of ownership savings, identifies which workloads can be right-sized, and maps dependencies between application tiers before any workload is moved. The team has limited knowledge of current CPU, memory, and network utilization. Which approach should the architect take first to produce the required migration planning artifacts?

Accepted Answer

Run Migration Center (formerly StratoZone/Migrate for Compute Engine assessment) to collect utilization data, build dependency maps, and generate right-sizing and TCO reports before defining migration waves.

Answer

Provision equivalently sized Compute Engine instances for all 400 VMs based on current on-premises specifications and measure actual costs for one month.

Answer

Use the Google Cloud Pricing Calculator with the on-premises hardware specifications to estimate monthly costs and present that as the TCO business case.

Answer

Begin a lift-and-shift migration of a representative subset of VMs using Migrate to Virtual Machines and extrapolate costs from that pilot.