It provides a planning center and migration advisors to analyze on-premises VMware VM configurations and create migration plans for cloud environments. You can manage saved VM inventory datasets and plans in the planning center.

The advisors support planning for:

For details about each target, see the migration advisor topics for Amazon EVS, Amazon EC2, VMware Cloud on AWS, and Google Cloud VMware Engine.

Advisors analyze VM configurations, help determine which VMs to migrate, estimate the space required on cloud-native external datastores, and present a deployment plan. Target-specific options can include VM selection, capacity and protection preferences, and storage assignments.

Workload Factory supports deployment for Amazon EC2, Amazon EVS, and VMware Cloud on AWS. For Google Cloud VMware Engine, the plan provides generated Terraform code to provision Google Cloud NetApp Volumes NFS datastores in your Terraform environment. See the deployment plan topics for Amazon EC2, Amazon EVS, and VMware Cloud on AWS.

FSx for ONTAP or Google Cloud NetApp Volumes provides NFS datastores that can complement vSAN storage. This storage scales independently of compute, so you can increase storage without adding hosts.

You can provide inventory from RVTools, the Workload Factory VM collector script, or NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights. RVTools captures VM configuration information; the collector can also capture current VM performance data, and Data Infrastructure Insights supplies infrastructure information through API communication. For details, see Upload VM inventory data.

The collector captures VM configuration plus current read and write IOPS and throughput statistics, which can support more accurate planning. RVTools captures configuration information but does not provide those performance statistics. See Capture VM configurations for more information.

There is no cost to use Workload Factory for VMware, and no special NetApp license is required. You pay for AWS resources that you deploy based on advisor recommendations.

Workload Factory is supported in commercial regions where FSx for ONTAP is supported. China regions, Secret Cloud, and Top Secret Cloud are not supported. For current AWS regional availability, see the supported Amazon regions.

The calculator compares potential EVS costs with and without FSx for ONTAP. You can adjust estimates by region, physical CPU, physical memory, VM storage, and EVS billing plan. If FSx for ONTAP is identified as the most cost-effective storage, you can create a detailed assessment. See Calculate EVS savings.

It analyzes discovered EVS environments for reliability and security findings. The documented checks assess partition placement group distribution for resiliency and EC2 stop and termination protection for cluster nodes. Findings include status, severity, affected resources, and remediation guidance. See Implement well-architected EVS configurations in Workload Factory.

Discovered EVS configurations are scanned automatically once per day using AWS APIs; vSphere credentials and vCenter connectivity are not required. You need AWS credentials with View, planning, and analysis permissions for VMware workloads, and at least one discovered EVS environment. For details, see the EVS well-architected analysis requirements.