Server Migration Center (SMC) is a server migration platform developed by Alibaba Cloud. SMC allows you to migrate one or more source servers to Alibaba Cloud. Source servers can be servers in self-managed data centers, virtual machines (VMs), third-party cloud servers, or servers of other types.

Benefits

An increasing number of enterprises migrate on-premises servers to the cloud to solve problems such as server deterioration, complex O & M, slow upgrade and scale-out, and high maintenance costs. However, server migration faces multiple challenges, such as complex migration scenarios, long migration periods, business interruptions, and data loss. Alibaba Cloud SMC provides the following benefits to help you easily migrate servers to the cloud:
  • Applies to a wide range of migration scenarios.

    SMC allows you to migrate mainstream servers and operating systems. Mainstream servers include physical hosts, VMs, and hosts on other cloud platforms. Mainstream operating systems include Windows 2003 and later, CentOS, Red Hat, Ubuntu, Debian, SUSE, and openSUSE.

  • Supports automated server migration.

    SMC supports automated, unattended server migration. You can check the migration progress by using the SMC console or calling API operations.

  • Provides automatic server restoration and result verification.

    SMC automatically detects server conditions and restores unhealthy servers before migration. After migration, you can verify migration results in the SMC console.

For more information, see Benefits and Scenarios.

Migration process

SMC consists of the SMC client and the SMC console. The following figure shows how to migrate a server to an Elastic Compute Service (ECS) image. Migration processProcedure:
  1. Download and run an SMC client on the server. The migration source information is imported to the SMC console while the SMC client is running.
  2. In the SMC console, create and start a migration task.
  3. View the progress of the migration task in the SMC console. After the migration is complete, an ECS image is generated.
  4. Create an ECS instance in the ECS console based on the ECS image.
For more information, see Migration process.

Billing rules

When you use SMC for migration, you are charged only for the ECS resources that you use. For more information, see Billing.

Technical support

For information about how to contact technical support, see Contact us.