Use agents to migrate data to Alibaba Cloud over an Express Connect circuit or VPN gateway, or from self-managed storage. Deploy an agent on a 64-bit Linux server with kernel version 2.6 or later. This setup reuses your existing server and virtual private cloud (VPC) for secure migration and outlines applicable scenarios and procedures.
When to use agents
You do not need an agent when migrating data from a third-party cloud to Alibaba Cloud over the Internet, or between Alibaba Cloud Object Storage Service (OSS) buckets. Use an agent when migrating data to Alibaba Cloud over an Express Connect circuit or VPN gateway, or from an FTP server, local file system, or self-managed storage. The following figure shows these migration scenarios.
Use an Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instance as the server on which you deploy the agent.
If you set the Network Type parameter of the agent to Leased Line/VPN (VPC), ensure that the ECS instance is connected to a VPC over an Express Connect circuit or VPN gateway. The ECS instance must also be in the same region where Data Online Migration is activated. If the ECS instance is in a different region, network connections may fail.
Usage notes
An agent must be associated with an existing tunnel, so create a tunnel before using an agent. The following section describes tunnel-agent relationships:
A tunnel can be associated with multiple agents at a time. You can specify the maximum bandwidth of the tunnel and the maximum number of requests per second over the tunnel to throttle the overall transmission for the agents associated with the tunnel.
Each agent can be associated with only one tunnel. Agent bandwidth is limited by the total bandwidth of that tunnel.
Procedure
To migrate data with an agent, perform the following steps.
Create a tunnel. For more information, see Manage tunnels.
Create an agent. For more information, see Manage agents.
Create a source data address. Based on the source data type, see the corresponding migration tutorial. For example, if your source data is stored in an Amazon Simple Storage Service (AWS S3) bucket, see "Step 2: Create a source data address" in Migrate data.
Create a destination data address. Based on the source data type, see the corresponding migration tutorial. For example, if you want to migrate data from an AWS S3 bucket to an Alibaba Cloud OSS bucket, see "Step 3: Create a destination data address" in Migrate data.
Create a data migration task. Based on the source data type, see the corresponding migration tutorial. For example, if you want to migrate data from an AWS S3 bucket to an Alibaba Cloud OSS bucket, see "Step 4: Create a migration task" in Migrate data.