Planning is the first step for you to have a successful migration.

In this Project, we have an average of 100 people on the IT team moving to AWS.

Our role, as the Cloud Solutions Engineer, will be to create a migration solution using automation.

In addition to migrating these users, it will be necessary to associate permissions to groups and users, which are required to have the MFA(Multi-factor authentication) enabled, adding an additional layer of security.

The post ON-PREMISES MIGRATION TO AWS – PART 1 first appeared on Cloud Engineer - Everton Collins.

Listed are some benefits to using AWS (Amazon Web Services) cloud.

• You can install a server in minutes and not days. (Our Windows 2012 Server should take 10-20 minutes to setup).
• Your server is automatically licensed and you don’t have to purchase a license for the Windows Server Software.
• You can setup your server locally to your market, so if your in New York you can setup a server in the East Coast reducing latency for all your users.

Step 1. –  You must have a AWS account, so if you don’t have an account head over to https://aws.amazon.com/ and create/login to your account.

Step: 1a. – You should create a new account or sign-in with your Amazon id/pw if you already have an account.  Be sure that this account is one that can be used by other members of your organization.

 Step 2. – Here you should select EC2 and notice you can change what region your server will be setup, there by reducing the latency your users will experience once they connect to your server.

Step 3. –  EC2 simply means stand for Elastic Cloud Compute, this is where you will spin-up the virtual server and which makes setting up new servers fast and very efficient.  As you will notice there are many other options in the dashboard which we won’t deal with today.

Step 4. – Listed in our account we should see all the running instances, volumes etc.  Here you can see I already have another instance installed, volume and key pair, plus 2 security groups setup.

Step 5 – Now we get to choose an Amazon Machine Image (AMI), for our installation we’ll be using ami-478d782c
(Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Base).

Step 6 – Our next step allows us to choose the instance type, simply choosing the specs for our server ie: Memory, CPU, Storage which we’ll need to consider so we have the right setup for our application and enough resources to handle the load.

Here we chose the t2.micro  (free tier eligible for 1 year).

Step 7. – Configuring our instance details, we set the IP address, subnet, Domain etc.  Many common settings when setting up a server in a Domain Environment.  You should already have a working knowledge of the domain you would like to configure.

Step 8. – You will need to provide disk storage, so select how many GB you’ll need for server setup and backup drives etc.

Step 9. – A very important step where you will need to setup a security group.  The security group allows who or what can access your server.  You can set the IP’s allowed to access your server and block various ip’s and ports on the server. Take a moment and set your security policy and apply to your server.

Step 10. – Take a moment to review your server settings, make any changes as needed for finalizing the server.

Step 12. – This step is very important as this is where you will set the password for your admin account.

Step 13 – At this stage your instance is almost ready to be launched, you will have to wait for the setup to complete.

Step 14. – Final Step is now to launch your instance, just wait for the setup to complete and use your id/pw to use remote desktop into your server.

Now you have your Windows 2012 Server Setup, configured now you can login into your server and begin deploying apps, setup hosting or whatever your plans are for your new server instance.

Resources:

• Getting Started with AWS videos steps.
• AWS Simple Monthly Calculator.

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This is a 2 part series on Virtualbox.

Virtualbox What it is? – Part 1.

Virtualbox How to Use it? – Part 2. – coming soon.

VirtualBox – is a general-purpose full virtualizer for x86 hardware, targeted at server, desktop and embedded use.  For a thorough introduction to virtualization and VirtualBox, please refer to the online version of the VirtualBox User Manual’s first chapter.

VirtualBox  virtualizer for x86 hardware, developed by Oracle and know as a well established solutions provider with products and solutions for every role in the enterprise.

A new VirtualBox installation on a mac laptop without any images installed.

End User Wiki Documentation (www.virtualbox.com)

In order to run VirtualBox on your machine, you need:

• Reasonably powerful x86 hardware. Any recent Intel or AMD processor should do.

• Memory. Depending on what guest operating systems you want to run, you will need at least 512 MB of RAM (but probably more, and the more the better). Basically, you will need whatever your host operating system needs to run comfortably, plus the amount that the guest operating system needs.So, if you want to run Windows XP on Windows XP, you probably won’t enjoy the experience much with less than 1 GB of RAM. If you want to try out Windows Vista in a guest, it will refuse to install if it is given less than 512 MB RAM, so you’ll need that for the guest alone, plus the memory your operating system normally needs.

• Hard disk space. While VirtualBox itself is very lean (a typical installation will only need about 30 MB of hard disk space), the virtual machines will require fairly huge files on disk to represent their own hard disk storage.  So, to install Windows XP, for example, you will need a file that will easily grow to several GB in size.

• A supported host operating system. Presently, we support Windows (XP and later), many Linux distributions, Mac OS X, Solaris and OpenSolaris.

• A supported guest operating system. Besides the user manual (see below), up-to-date information is available at “Status: Guest OSes“.

Best to check the Wiki on settings needed for current Operating Systems ie: Windows 7, 8, and soon Windows 10 or even Mac OX 10.

In Part 2 – Virtualbox How to Use it? We’ll give some specific examples of using Virtualbox to run several operating systems on your laptop or desktop computer without having to setup a new pc.

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