Replicate/Migrate SAS 9.4 Platform in a VM to GCP

[alko13]

Planning to Migrate/Replicate an existing SAS 9.4 M3 on a VM into Google Cloud.

We initially plan for a lift and shift approach. No separate SAS installation and  migrate of contents in GCP. Only clone the vm instance to GCP.

Does SAS has a guide for this migration/cloning into GCP?

[SASKiwi]

Have you got expert advice whether this is even possible and supported? Even when your architecture and platform remains exactly the same, the expert advice I have always received is to install from scratch then migrate content afterwards. If you haven't got expert advice yet, I highly recommend you get it. There won't be any guides for unsupported migration approaches.

It's also worth remembering that SAS 9.4M3 goes into limited support in 18 months. My advice would be to do a new install of SAS 9.4M8 on cloud as then you will have five years of full support. There is always a lot of work involved in any software migration and I can't see the point of having a cloud platform with only 18 months of full support remaining.