The Application Migration Process

Migrating an application involves the following steps:

  1. Meet requirements for your environment as well as source and destination machines. See.

  2. Double-click the Administrative Console shortcut icon on your desktop to start Administrative Console.

  3. Create a virtual container and connect it to the source machine.

  4. Pre-populate the virtual container with applications, services, accounts, components, and files selected from the source machine.

  5. Run your virtualized application on the destination machine and exercise the application. See .

  6. Run VirtaMove Dissolve if you want to remove the migration container from the application and transfer the application to the underlying operating system on the destination machine so that the application will behave as if natively installed. Note that this process cannot be reversed. See . You may wish to keep the application running in the migration container, as required.

Pre-Populate

Pre-populating a container is part of the VirtaMove application migration process. Pre-population migrates remote products, services, users, and groups without requiring downtime of the application on the source server. Any locked files will not be copied over until the application is fully exercised.

Pre-populate captures components of the application while the application is up and running on the source server. You can then schedule a maintenance window at a later time for the application. It is during this maintenance window that you would stop and shut down the application before you complete the migration by exercising the application.

Pre-populate occurs when you click the Pre-Populate button in the VirtaMove Administrative Console under the Tether tab. A window displays the status of the Pre-Populate process.