← Supported toolsAWS native

AWS Migration Evaluator

AWS's expert-led migration business case service, and the strongest AWS-native option when Microsoft licensing is the expensive question.

What it is

AWS's expert-led migration business case service, provided at no cost. It models BYOL against licence-included and dedicated tenancy against shared, pricing several purchasing scenarios side by side. That licensing depth is why we reach for it when the entitlement position carries the estate.

What it collectsInventory and utilisation through read-only access to VMware, Hyper-V, Windows, Linux, Active Directory and SQL Server, using WMI, SNMP, vSphere and T-SQL. No agents on hypervisors or servers
How it deploysOne Windows Server virtual machine inside your network. Data is encrypted locally, re-encrypted with a certificate specific to you, and sent over HTTPS to an S3 bucket. Flat file exports work instead if you would rather deploy nothing
Time to usable dataA one-page projected cost split arrives roughly 48 hours after collection starts. A full business case wants two to four weeks of utilisation behind it
We reach for it whenWindows and SQL Server-heavy estates, where the entitlement position is worth more than the compute optimisation

How we use it

We reconcile the tool's own totals against the pricing calculator export line by line before any modelling starts, then layer on the licensing analysis it does not perform: entitlement mapping, core-minimum effects, edition optimisation and tenancy comparison.

One thing to watch: where provisioning or utilisation data has gaps, industry benchmarks are applied automatically. The report looks equally complete whether the input was complete or not, and that is the most common way a confident business case turns out to be wrong. Citrix XenServer is also unsupported, and hypervisor-level matching covers VMware and Hyper-V only.

Four failure modes we check for

Every one of these has turned up in production data. What they have in common is that the report still looks finished afterwards, so none of them announces itself.

Zero utilised storageWhere a volume reports 0 GB utilised, the lens tool substitutes the provisioned figure in its own calculation while the pricing calculator export can carry the literal zeros. The two totals then disagree, and the disagreement is silent
Version without editionSQL Server exports frequently carry version but not edition. An edition-blind licensing model is built on the wrong variable, and the error only surfaces at procurement
Hosts collected instead of guestsAdd a host rather than its guests and sizing and utilisation come back looking healthy while every SQL instance underneath stays invisible. The dataset looks complete and is materially not
Ingest failures that read as absencesA gap between an instance count and a downstream table is more often a failed load into the tool than missing source data. We reconcile counts across every view before we model anything

Official resources

We would rather point you at the vendor than paraphrase them. What we add is what happens when you run it against a real estate.

Product pageaws.amazon.comGetting started and collector setupaws.amazon.comAWS Prescriptive Guidancedocs.aws.amazon.com

Already running this?

Then you may be closer to a business case than you think. Send us what you have and we will tell you what it supports and where we would want to check it.

Talk to us →Compare all tools →