Planning large VDI migrations to the AWS Cloud

Martin Guenthner, Amazon Web Services (AWS)

December 2023 (document history)

In the migration space, large-scale migrations of applications are a well-established pattern. Many organizations also need to migrate virtual desktop infrastructures (VDIs). However, because VDIs are end-user facing and have special requirements, in terms of availability, accessibility, and provisioning, this type of migration requires special considerations and planning compared to typical large-scale migrations.

This guide describes multiple architectural decision points for planning a large-scale migration of on-premises VDIs to the AWS Cloud. It also includes some additional recommendations for migrating from a Citrix environment, but these recommendations can also apply to other source technology stacks.

This guide helps you plan a large VDI migration to the AWS Cloud by providing a checklist of decisions that you'll need to make during the migration. As you complete the checklist, you'll be making informed decisions about the migration and the target architecture, which includes Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances and Amazon FSx file shares.

The technical and non-technical considerations in this guide can also be used to evaluate alternatives to traditional VDI solutions, such as Amazon WorkSpaces or Amazon AppStream 2.0. As part of your migration planning, we recommend that you do a feasibility assessment to consider migrating to these services.

Intended audience

This guide is intended for VDI platform owners who are considering a platform migration to AWS, storage architects who support the migration approach, and compliance and risk teams who guide the decision-making process for reliability requirements.