Migrate to Virtual Machines on the PCA Exam

Migrate to Virtual Machines comes up enough on the Professional Cloud Architect exam that it is worth knowing exactly what the service does, where it pulls from, and what it leaves behind. Google has a habit of naming services in ways that almost spoil the answer for you, and this one is a good example. Migrate to Virtual Machines is Google Cloud's managed service for migrating external VMs into Google Compute Engine.

Source environments you can migrate from

The first thing to keep in your head for a Professional Cloud Architect question is the list of supported source environments. Migrate to Virtual Machines works with:

• VMware vSphere on-premises VMware infrastructure
• AWS EC2 instances running in Amazon Web Services
• Azure VMs running in Microsoft Azure
• VMware Engine, which is Google Cloud's own VMware Engine service

If a scenario gives you any of those four as the starting point and the destination is Compute Engine, Migrate to Virtual Machines is the answer the exam is looking for.

The three-step migration flow

The migration itself follows three steps, in this order:

1. Discovery. The service finds and catalogs your source VMs so you have an inventory to migrate.
2. Replication. Migrate to VMs continuously replicates your VM data while the source VMs stay running. This is what keeps downtime small, because the bulk of the data is already in Google Cloud by the time you cut over.
3. Cutover or migration. The service performs the automated cutover and the workload runs on Compute Engine.

I like that ordering because it lines up with how a real migration plays out. You cannot migrate what you have not inventoried, you cannot cut over with confidence until replication has caught up, and the cutover itself should be the smallest, most automated step.

What is preserved on the destination side

Once VMs land in Compute Engine, three things stay intact:

• Applications intact. Whatever was running on the source VM keeps running on the migrated VM.
• Configurations preserved. OS settings, installed software, and the rest of the VM configuration carry over.
• Data migrated. No manual data transfer is needed on top of the service.

The reason Google calls this out is that it is the whole point of using a managed migration service instead of a hand-rolled lift-and-shift. The service handles discovery, replication, and cutover automatically while keeping the applications and configurations the way they were on the source.

How I'd answer this on the PCA exam

If a Professional Cloud Architect question describes an organization with VMs in VMware vSphere, AWS, or Azure that wants to move to Compute Engine with minimal downtime and without rebuilding their applications, Migrate to Virtual Machines is the right service. If the question is asking about the migration steps, the order is discovery, then replication, then cutover. And if the question is asking what survives the move, the answer is applications, configurations, and data.

My Professional Cloud Architect course covers Migrate to Virtual Machines alongside the rest of the advanced architecture material.