Migrating EcoStruxure IT Advisor to Cloud

[mayurbhatti]

We currently have an EcoStruxure IT Advisor running on our on-premises system. Our goal is to migrate this setup to AWS while preserving our existing configurations and data. Could someone share some guidance on how to migrate ITA to AWS?

Product Information:
EcoStruxure IT Advisor
Version: EcoStruxureITAdvisor9.5.0-offline
System: Rocky Linux 8.10 and 100GB Volume.

Questions:

• Does Schneider Electric provide an OVA file or a Marketplace AMI for ITA to facilitate deployment on AWS? If not, what is the recommended method for deploying ITA on AWS?

• Are there any official guides or best practices for installing ITA on AWS?
• What is the process for restoring our existing backups to the new AWS deployment?
  
• Are there any considerations or potential issues we should be aware of during the restoration process?

I appreciate any insights, experiences, or resources you can share to assist us in this migration. Thank you in advance for your support!

[Jef]

Hi Mayurbhatti,

In general, the supported options for EcoStruxure IT Advisor (ITA) is:
on-premise ITA - using the out-of-box installation which contains the shipped OS (Rocky Linux) or running ITA as application on own Rocky Linux or RedHat server (https://community.se.com/t5/Installing-ITA-on-RHEL/Installing-ITA-9-1-1-and-newer-on-Red-Hat-Enterpr...) as long as deployed on supported version of OS which meets the ITA system requirements.

hosted ITA - managed by Schneider Electric 

Other hosting environment(s) not tested.

If you are interested in moving the product to =S= managed hosted environment, then you might want to contact your local salesperson for more details or post a request here https://app.ecostruxureit.com/request .

Kind regards,

Jef

[gsterling]

Hello, adding some additional comments to the previous response you received. Schneider does not perform formal tests of IT Advisor on other cloud platforms like AWS. Our experience both internally and with customers has been IT Advisor will in general install and run successfully on any hypervisor or platform on which an operating system which meets ITA's system requirements can be deployed.

So if you are able to deploy RockyLinux 8.10 on your AWS platform, then ITA should successfully install and run.

Schneider does not offer an OVA form of ITA, only the ISO form. When deployed using the ISO file as the boot device, then Rocky Linux 8.10 is deployed during installation, then ITA is installed on that operating system. For customers choosing to deploy RHEL 8.10, then that customer would deploy the RHEL OS, then mount the ITA iso, and install ITA as an application on the RHEL OS following the instructions from the community to install ITA 9.1 or newer on RHEL.

There are no specific best practices we document as we have not formally tested installing ITA in AWS. I would suggest you look up how to install rocky linux 8.10 on AWS and follow those practices. If you intend to use rocky linux, then the ITA installer should then work.

 The migration process, backup/restore would be identical to any other ITA backup / restore. Login to the ITA web client UI as an adminstrator, go to the administration menu, backup/restore. Then schedule a back to run now, then from the backups view, download the backup from the current ITA. From the new ITA running in AWS, login as an administrator, go to the administration menu, then backup/restore. Choose upload file to upload the backup file previously downloaded, once uploaded, click the restore button next to the uploaded file now present in the backups/restore view.

The above backup/restore process is the same process using for ITA migrations, recoveries, and so on.

Usually the biggest risk during restore is disk space on the ITA server. I'd suggest using the disk space allocations on the current ITA server as a guide for the disk space allocations on the AWS server assuming your current server has plenty of disk space and isn't out of disk space. Backup files are by default stored in /data/backup (this can be changed by the customer), and backup files are "zip'd" so the /tmp filesystem is used when backups are created and restored ... so if your backup file is 2GB in size, you'll need approx 3x that size of free space in the /tmp folder to create a new backup and restore.

Regards

Greg Sterling

[mayurbhatti]

@gsterling We have one more question, 

Will it be an issue if the MAC/IP is changed on the appliance?

[gsterling]

No, changing the mac/IP address on an ITA server should have no impact the running server. It may of course mean you'll need to recreate any signed SSL certificates for the ITA server ( if you were using them ).

Does your ITA server access any external systems like AD/LDAP, Data Center Expert, vCenter, UCS Manager, OneView and so on? Keep in mind ITA reaches out to those systems for authentication (AD/LDAP) or fetching data via web services so if your ITA server is in a public cloud it may be reaching into your data center network to try to connect to those items.

Regards

Greg Sterling