Migrate Your Infrastructure to Google Cloud Without Losing Your Mind

Google Cloud Migration Center is a collection of tools that helps you migrate infrastructure to Google Cloud without completely losing your mind. Unlike the usual nightmare of one-off migration scripts or manually tracking 500 servers in Excel, it gives you one place to handle discovery, assessment, and coordination.

Migration Center combines several previously separate tools into one interface. But you'll still inevitably run into the mysterious issues that crop up at 2 AM during a maintenance window.

The main benefit is that you don't have to juggle 15 different migration utilities. Instead of using separate tools for discovery, cost estimation, and planning, you get one interface that handles most of the tedious inventory work for you. Will it catch every edge case in your environment? Hell no. But it'll catch enough to save you from the worst migration disasters.

What Migration Center Actually Does

Migration Center does four things to keep your migration from becoming a complete disaster:

Discovery - Scans your existing infrastructure to figure out what you actually have. Supports VMware environments, AWS instances, physical servers, and databases. The discovery client runs as a VM or container and phones home with inventory data. It won't catch everything (edge cases never get discovered by automated tools), but it'll find your main workloads and databases.

Cost Estimation - Takes your discovered assets and tries to estimate what they'll cost on Google Cloud. The cost calculator applies some optimizations by default, which is both good and bad. Good because you get right-sized recommendations. Bad because estimates run low by at least a third once you factor in all the shit that goes wrong.

Assessment and Planning - Analyzes your infrastructure to identify dependencies, compatibility issues, and migration complexity. This is where you find out that your "simple" web application actually depends on 47 different services and a database that hasn't been patched since 2019. The dependency mapping helps prevent the classic mistake of migrating something that breaks half your other systems.

And of course it'll miss that critical batch job that only runs on Sundays and takes down the entire accounting system when you migrate the database it depends on. Ask me how I know.

Integration with Migration Tools - Migration Center doesn't actually migrate anything itself. It hands off to other Google Cloud services like Database Migration Service, VM Migration, and Application Migration. Think of it as mission control for your migration project.

The nice thing is you don't have to log into 12 different tools to see your migration status. Is it perfect? No. Will it save you from manually tracking spreadsheets with hundreds of servers? Absolutely.

Resources Worth Bookmarking:

• Migration Strategy Framework - Read this first unless you enjoy wasting 3 months figuring out the approach
• Discovery and Assessment Overview - How dependency mapping actually works (and where it breaks)
• VMware to Google Cloud Guide - If you're escaping VMware licensing costs like everyone else
• Database Migration Service - For when you need to move databases without breaking everything
• Troubleshooting Migration Issues - Bookmark this for 3am emergency fixes

Migration Center tries to tackle enterprise-scale migration projects, but like every migration tool, it has quirks you'll discover the hard way. Here's what breaks when you deploy this in the real world with thousands of servers and legacy applications that haven't been documented properly.

Discovery: What Gets Found (And What Doesn't)

The Discovery Client runs as a lightweight VM or container that scans your infrastructure and phones home with inventory data. It supports VMware vSphere, AWS EC2, Azure VMs, and physical servers.

What discovery does well:

• Finds standard VMs, databases, and common applications
• Collects CPU, memory, disk, and network utilization metrics
• Maps basic network connections and dependencies
• Works in air-gapped environments with offline exports

What discovery misses (learned the hard way):

• Custom applications with non-standard ports
• Services running on unusual configurations
• Legacy databases with weird connection strings
• Applications that only run during specific time windows
• Anything behind complex load balancers or proxies

If your security team won't let you run automated discovery, you can import RVTools exports or upload CSV files manually. This takes longer but works when you're dealing with locked-down environments or compliance requirements that block automated scanning.

Assessment: Where Reality Meets Estimates

The assessment engine takes your discovered infrastructure and tries to figure out how to migrate it without breaking everything. This is where you learn that your "simple" three-tier application actually depends on 47 different services.

Technical Fit Assessment - Compares your current workloads against Google Cloud services and recommends target architectures. It's pretty good at identifying obvious compatibility issues (like Windows 2003 servers that need upgrading), but struggles with custom applications that do weird things.

Dependency Analysis - Maps application and network connections to help plan migration waves. This prevents the classic mistake of migrating a database before the applications that use it, which tends to result in 3 AM emergency calls.

The Problem With Dependencies: Automated dependency mapping finds the obvious connections but misses the subtle ones. That batch job that only runs monthly? The service that connects through a weird proxy configuration? The application that talks to a mainframe via a custom protocol? You'll discover those dependencies during the migration, not during the assessment.

Performance Optimization - Analyzes resource utilization to recommend right-sized Google Cloud instances. The recommendations are usually solid for standard workloads, but the tool tends to be optimistic about how much you can downsize legacy applications that have never been properly optimized.

Cost Estimates: Budget Reality Check

The cost estimation engine takes your discovered infrastructure and tries to predict Google Cloud costs. It considers compute, storage, network, licensing, and operational overhead - but like every cost estimator, it's more of an educated guess than a precise budget.

What the cost estimates do well:

• Apply sustained use discounts and committed use pricing automatically
• Include specialized calculators for SAP workloads and data warehousing
• Factor in rightsizing recommendations based on actual utilization

Where cost estimates go wrong:

• Network egress costs are usually underestimated
• Doesn't account for the "learning curve tax" of new tools and services
• Assumes you'll actually implement all the optimization recommendations
• Misses costs for migration tooling, training, and consulting
• Ignores the fact that you'll probably over-provision initially to be safe

Pro tip: Take the estimate, add 40-60% for reality, then add another buffer for the stuff that always goes wrong. If Migration Center estimates around 50-something K, you'll probably hit 75K+ most months.

I've seen Migration Center estimate like 47K or something, we ended up paying over 70K every month for the first six months. I finally started tracking this because nobody believed the pattern was real.

Integration With Migration Tools

Migration Center doesn't actually migrate anything - it's mission control for other Google Cloud migration services. It hands off to Database Migration Service for databases, VM Migration for virtual machines, and Application Migration for container migrations.

The integration works well when everything goes according to plan. The problem is that migrations rarely go according to plan. When something breaks during execution, you're troubleshooting across multiple tools and trying to figure out which service is causing the issue.

Deep Technical Resources:

• Discovery Client Architecture - How the discovery agent actually works (and breaks)
• Cost Estimation Algorithm - The math behind optimistic cost projections
• Migration Wave Planning - Dependency sequencing (for when you get it wrong the first time)
• Enterprise Architecture Patterns - Reference architectures that work in the real world
• Cloud Monitoring - Essential for figuring out what broke during migration