Tutorial

How to Migrate VMs from AWS to Zadara — Complete Agentless Guide

Moving workloads from AWS to Zadara used to mean weeks of planning, agent installations, and manual disk conversions. With Z-Move's agentless engine, the same migration takes minutes to set up and hours to complete — with zero software deployed inside your VMs.

This is a real production walkthrough. The migration below is from AWS US East (Ohio) to Zadara Luanda 02, performed for Angola Cables. It completed in 3 minutes 20 seconds for a lightweight instance. Enterprise workloads with larger disks take longer, but the process is identical.

Why migrate from AWS to Zadara?

There are several reasons enterprises choose Zadara over AWS for production workloads:

• Cost: Zadara's storage-as-a-service model often delivers 40–60% cost savings on storage-heavy workloads compared to AWS EBS and S3 pricing.
• Data sovereignty: Zadara operates regional clusters in Africa (Angola, Nigeria), Europe, and beyond — keeping data in-country for compliance.
• Performance: Zadara's NVMe-based VPSA delivers predictable, dedicated storage performance without the noisy-neighbor issues of shared AWS storage.
• Vendor independence: Breaking out of the AWS gravity well protects your organization from pricing changes and regional availability events.

Prerequisites

Before starting, make sure you have:

• AWS IAM credentials with ec2:DescribeInstances, ec2:DescribeVolumes, ec2:CreateSnapshot, and related permissions
• Zadara API credentials (available from the Zadara portal under Settings → API Access)
• Access to the Z-Move platform at zmove.click
• Network connectivity between the migration workers and both cloud environments (Z-Move handles this automatically for standard deployments)

Step-by-step: AWS → Zadara migration

1. 01

   Connect your cloud credentials

   Log in to Z-Move and navigate to Credentials → Add Provider. Select AWS and enter your IAM Access Key ID and Secret Access Key. Z-Move encrypts these immediately using Fernet encryption — they are never stored in plaintext.

   Repeat for Zadara: select Zadara as the provider, enter your API endpoint and access token.

2. 02

   Discover and select VMs

   Z-Move queries the AWS API to list your EC2 instances. Select the instance(s) you want to migrate. For each instance, you'll see the attached volumes, their sizes, and the instance type. No agent installation. No reboot required.

3. 03

   Configure the target

   Select your Zadara cluster as the target. Choose the target VPSA, storage pool, and network configuration. Z-Move maps AWS instance types to recommended Zadara VM specs, but you can adjust these manually.

4. 04

   Launch the migration

   Click Start Migration. Z-Move provisions ephemeral worker instances in both AWS and Zadara automatically. These workers handle the disk streaming — your source VM keeps running during the process.

   ●●●   zmove — job #28 · aws-us-east-1 → zadara-luanda-02

   $ zmove start --source aws-ohio-01 --target zadara-luanda-02
   ────────────────────────────────────────────────
   ✓ Source auth · AWS US East (Ohio)
   ✓ Target auth · Zadara Luanda 02
   ⟳ Provisioning ephemeral workers...
   ✓ Workers ready · auto-destroy ON
   ────────────────────────────────────────────────
   i VM: web-prod-01 · 1 disk · 21 GB
   streaming ████████████████████ 100% · 53 MB/s
   ✓ Transfer complete · 3m 20s · 0 errors
   ✓ Workload rebuilt in Zadara
   ✓ Ephemeral workers destroyed
   ────────────────────────────────────────────────
   ✓ Done. No agents. No residue.

5. 05

   Verify and cut over

   Once migration completes, Z-Move confirms data integrity via checksum verification. The migrated VM boots in Zadara in the same state it was in AWS. Verify your application works correctly, then point DNS or load balancer to the new instance and shut down the AWS original.

Cost breakdown: AWS to Zadara migration

Using Z-Move's pricing model of $0.05 per GB:

• A 100 GB workload costs $5.00 to migrate
• A 1 TB workload costs $51.20
• A 10 TB workload costs $512.00

Compare this to AWS MGN (free for the first 90 days, then replication costs) or commercial tools like Zerto ($300+/month per VM). For one-time migrations, Z-Move's pay-per-GB model is almost always cheaper.

You can estimate your exact cost using the Z-Move cost calculator.

Common questions

Does the source VM need to be shut down?

No. Z-Move takes a snapshot of the running instance and streams from there. The source VM stays up throughout the process. For databases requiring consistent state (e.g., SAP HANA), we recommend a brief quiesce window before snapshot — contact us for guidance on enterprise database migrations.

What about Windows VMs?

Fully supported. Z-Move has migrated both Windows Server and Linux workloads. Boot disk handling for Windows includes automatic driver injection for the target hypervisor environment.

Is there a limit on disk count?

No fixed limit. Z-Move's parallel engine streams multiple disks simultaneously. We've migrated instances with 7 disks (SAP HANA, United Investment) in a single job.

Next steps

Ready to try it on your environment? Request a demo and we'll walk through your specific workloads — including pre-migration assessment and cost estimation.