GCP – How Facturation.net migrated Azure VMs to Google Cloud in one weekend

Facturation.net is a leading Canadian provider of a cloud-based invoicing and billing software. With many customers in Canada, its mission is to help doctors and their administrative staff with their medical billing and provide customized software and services.

“As our business grew, we realized that our existing Azure infrastructure was no longer meeting our needs. We were facing increasing costs and complexity, and we wanted to find a more scalable and cost-effective solution,” said Jacob Verret, CTO at Facturation.net. “After evaluating several options, we decided to migrate our production VMs to Google Cloud.”

The challenge was figuring out how to migrate Facturation.net production virtual machines (VMs) in Azure over a single weekend without any impact to our production workloads. The company needed a solution that was simple, reliable, and cost-effective.

After researching its options, Facturation.net decided to use Migrate to Virtual Machines (M2VM) on Google Cloud. 

M2VM, which is part of the Google Cloud Migration Center, allows you to migrate virtual machines from VMware, AWS, and Azure environments to Compute Engine in a few minutes. With M2VM, you can migrate VMs safely, at high velocity, and at scale.

M2VM is designed to be simple and easy to use. It has a user-friendly interface and requires no special skills or expertise. The service provides several benefits that make it a great choice for cloud-to-cloud migrations, including:

Fast and efficient migration: M2VM uses a high-performance data transfer engine that can migrate VMs quickly and efficiently.

Proven reliability: Google Cloud customers have used M2VM to migrate hundreds of thousands of VMs from on-premises and cloud environments.

Enterprise-grade security: M2VM uses industry-standard security protocols to protect your data during migration.

Cost-effective: As a managed service, M2VM is a cost-effective solution that can help you save money on your cloud migration. It has no additional costs on top of those associated Google resources.

Migrating Azure VMs to Google Cloud

The Facturation.net team used the following step-by-step approach to migrate their VMs using M2VM:

The team created a detailed migration plan that included a list of the VMs to migrate, the target Google Cloud project, and the desired migration start and end times. They also made sure that the VMs were properly prepared for migration, including having the latest security patches installed and disabling any unnecessary services.

They enabled M2VM by creating a migration project in the Google Cloud console, added an Azure source, and defined the target project on Google Cloud for the migration process.

To start the migration process, the team selected the VMs to be migrated and the target Google Cloud project. M2VM then created a replication job for each VM. They monitored the progress of the replication jobs in the M2VM console.

Once the replication jobs were complete, they tested the migrated VMs to make sure they were working properly and then performed a cutover to switch traffic from the Azure VMs to the new Google Cloud VMs.

After the transition was complete, the team cleaned up the Azure resources that were no longer needed.

Fast, flexible, and safe migration to Google Cloud

“We were very happy with the results of our migration using M2VM. The process was straightforward, and the intuitive user interface allowed us to migrate our VMs without any problems. On top of that, it was incredibly fast — we were able to migrate all of our production VMs over to Google Cloud in a single weekend,” said Alexander Grange, senior cloud architect at Facturation.Net, who led the migration effort.

In addition, Facturation.net did not experience any data loss or corruption during the migration process, and since M2VM uses industry-standard protocols, the team was confident that the company’s data was safe and secure during the migration process. The cost of migration was also very reasonable, allowing Facturation.net to save money on its cloud migration.

Overall, thanks to Migration to Virtual Machines and the Google Cloud team, Facturation.net was able to move rapidly from Azure to Google Cloud — without impacting production.