How to automate migrations with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Red Hat® Ansible® Automation Platform makes it possible to automate one of the most troublesome and time-consuming processes in your IT department: migration.

Migration is the process of upgrading your IT infrastructure by moving from the use of one form of hardware or software to another. This could involve moving from physical infrastructure to virtual, from one virtual environment to another, from clouds to containers, or any combination of these.  It could also mean moving to a new operating system, moving between software programs, or migrating existing assets from one platform to another.

With Ansible Automation Platform, you can cut down on the time, money, and headaches that usually come with a manual migration process. And regardless of what you’re migrating, you can perform migrations at scale—with speed, consistency, and accuracy.

Typically, manual migration of any application or service is a process that’s complicated, error-prone, and difficult to consistently repeat. You might need to work through a list of tasks, such as:

• Deploying servers into an environment.
• Configuring operating systems by following deployment checklists and guides.
• Provisioning virtual infrastructure and cloud or container resources.
• Spot-modifying configurations as needed until everything works.
• Repeating this process for every environment, application, deployment, etc.

In the long run, a manual approach to migration just doesn’t work efficiently. Different system administrators will use different methods and tools—causing disparity between applications as they are migrated. And the need for manual repetition makes human error much more likely. More errors means that you need to go back, find the problem, fix it, and find all of the other places it occurred so you can fix those errors too. This process can be time-consuming, costly, and frustrating.

Because migration is so nuanced and manually involved, upgrading and taking advantage of the "next big thing" in technology—like generative artificial intelligence (gen AI), containers, or edge computing—becomes a difficult and dreaded undertaking.

The good news is that you can simplify the migration process, get work done faster, and free up your staff to focus on bigger issues by implementing automated migration.

Automation solves many of the problems introduced by manual migration. It lets you define what needs to happen to successfully migrate an application, piece of infrastructure, or system, and then repeat the process as often as necessary. The result is migration that is scalable, quicker, less error-prone, and more easily adjusted for different use cases.

Ansible Automation Platform helps you get started automating migrations with a simple 3-step process: Define, deploy, and discover. This approach emphasizes automating the smallest things first, becoming comfortable with the process, gaining confidence and knowledge of the nuances of the system or process, and then applying what you’ve learned again and again.

• Define. Begin by determining each component to be automated, accounting for order and process along the way.
• Deploy. Use your component definitions and automations to do a deployment and test it out.
• Discover. Each time you apply your automations, you can test the application or software as it has been deployed and discover existing gaps or errors. Then you can go back and redefine the particular aspect that needs improvement, and restart the 3-step cycle.

Once you fully define each component and task in the migration process, you can string them together in an Ansible Playbook and then start applying the playbook in the new environment. Ansible Playbooks record and execute configuration, deployment, and orchestration functions. They offer a simple, reusable configuration management and multi-machine deployment system that lets you effectively record the migration process and repeat it as necessary.

In this way, automating with Ansible Automation Platform allows for rapid iteration and repetition. It helps you create the automation content you need to complete a migration, manage that migration from a single platform, and scale your efforts as needed. As a result, gaps and problems that might exist are exposed and addressed much more quickly. This also means that you don’t have to get everything 100% correct from the outset. The more you tweak, fix, and refine as you go, the smoother your process will run. And after you’ve defined everything involved in the migration using the same process, it becomes easier to adapt the migration for different use cases.

Rising costs and changes in the virtualization space are prompting organizations to migrate their virtual machines (VMs) to modern solutions. Fortunately, you can accelerate the migration of your existing VMs to a single, unified management platform with Red Hat OpenShift® Virtualization and Ansible Automation Platform.

OpenShift Virtualization lets you migrate traditional VMs from other hypervisors and run them on Red Hat OpenShift. It also helps you simplify Day 2 operations and manage all of your VMs, containers, and serverless workloads from a single platform.

While you can migrate existing VMs using OpenShift Virtualization and the included Migration Toolkit for Virtualization, Ansible Automation Platform makes the process more consistent, efficient, and scalable. You can choose to automate as much of the migration as you want, and you can use templates in the process so it can be repeated again and again.

Although every VM migration is different, automating a migration with Ansible Automation Platform can be accomplished in a few simple steps:

1. Identify the VM you want to migrate.
2. Select the appropriate template, configured for migrating VMs, from the Ansible Automation Platform dashboard.
3. Customize the template settings for your specific VM and launch the template.
4. Check the status of the migration and monitor logs in the Red Hat OpenShift dashboard.

Once you’ve migrated your VMs, Ansible Automation Platform helps you automate Day 2 operations and other management tasks. This includes:

• Provisioning VMs for public cloud or private cloud solutions.
• Automating ongoing management tasks and orchestrating tasks across cloud and on-premise environments.
• Creating automation jobs with prepackaged bundles of certified and validated Ansible content.
• Coordinating the deployment of applications, networks, cloud services, and more.

Learn how to install Ansible Automation Platform on Red Hat OpenShift. Video duration: 2:25.

Automation is not an all-or-nothing paradigm. Taking small, incremental steps that everyone on a team can benefit from is much better than one or two automation engineers holding all the necessary knowledge. Automation needs to be a common language that everyone in an organization contributes to, takes advantage of, and understands.

Red Hat offers multiple training courses to help you build the knowledge and skills you need to start automating migrations with Ansible Automation Platform. You can explore learning resources to help you accomplish specific automation tasks, or you can try out a hands-on learning scenario with one of our interactive labs.

And if you’re looking to expand automation adoption across your organization, Red Hat Services can help you get started. They provide real-world expertise, mentorship, training, and consulting services to help drive adoption—no matter where you are in your automation journey. They can also help you set up an automation Community of Practice to foster a culture of continuous learning and collaboration.