GCP Professional Cloud Architect Practice Question

Your company's migration team has completed inventory and dependency mapping in Migration Center. They plan to move a three-tier order-processing application composed of 20 VMware VMs that integrate with on-premises Oracle and partner APIs. The team needs to run a full functional test of the application in Google Cloud while production remains on-premises. The test environment must be isolated to avoid IP conflicts, and the final cutover must be completed with less than 15 minutes of downtime. Which migration approach best meets these requirements?

Refactor the workloads into containers, build images from the VMs, deploy on Google Kubernetes Engine, and migrate the Oracle database to Cloud Spanner using Database Migration Service before switching traffic.
Copy full VM disks to Google Cloud with Transfer Appliance, create persistent disks from the uploads, start Compute Engine VMs, and connect users through Cloud VPN.
Use Migrate to Virtual Machines to replicate the VMware servers, create an isolated test-clone wave in a dedicated test subnet, validate the application, and execute a timed low-downtime cutover.
Export each VM as OVA files, import them as custom images in Compute Engine, launch replacement instances, then update DNS once manual testing is complete.

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Answer Description

Migrate to Virtual Machines (formerly Velostrata) provides continuous block-level replication from on-premises VMware to Compute Engine. Its test-clone feature lets you spin up isolated copies of the VMs in a separate Google Cloud subnet, enabling end-to-end functional validation while production continues on-premises. Because the bulk of data is replicated continuously, the planned cutover requires only a final incremental sync and VM start-up, typically finishing within minutes and keeping downtime well under the 15-minute target.

Exporting OVAs or using Transfer Appliance creates static copies that fall out of sync with ongoing changes, leading to longer outages during resynchronization. Refactoring into containers and migrating the database to Cloud Spanner is a long-term modernization effort and does not prioritize minimal-downtime lift-and-shift migration.

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