AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional — Question 256

A company needs to move its on-premises resources to AWS. The current environment consists of 100 virtual machines (VMs) with a total of 40 TB of storage.
Most of the VMs can be taken offline because they support functions during business hours only, however, some are mission critical, so downtime must be minimized.
The administrator of the on-premises network provisioned 10 Mbps of internet bandwidth for the migration. The on-premises network throughput has reached capacity and would be costly to increase. A solutions architect must design a migration solution that can be performed within the next 3 months.
Which method would fulfill these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Set up a 1 Gbps AWS Direct Connect connection. Then, provision a private virtual interface, and use AWS Server Migration Service (SMS) to migrate the VMs into Amazon EC2.
• B. Use AWS Application Discovery Service to assess each application, and determine how to refactor and optimize each using AWS services or AWS Marketplace solutions.
• C. Export the VMs locally, beginning with the most mission-critical servers first. Use AWS Transfer for SFTP to securely upload each VM to Amazon S3 after they are exported. Use VM Import/Export to import the VMs into Amazon EC2.
• D. Migrate mission-critical VMs with AWS SMS. Export the other VMs locally and transfer them to Amazon S3 using AWS Snowball. Use VM Import/Export to import the VMs into Amazon EC2.

Correct answer: A

Explanation

The correct answer is A because establishing a 1 Gbps AWS Direct Connect connection allows for a fast and reliable migration of the VMs to Amazon EC2, which is crucial given the bandwidth limitations. Options B and C do not address the need for minimizing downtime and efficient migration within the timeframe. Option D, while it includes AWS SMS, relies on AWS Snowball which may not be as efficient for mission-critical VMs that need to be migrated quickly.