Status: Available now. On 6 November 2026 AWS also combined assessments and wave planning into a single AWS Transform job.
What AWS announced
AWS Transform is AWS's service for discovering, assessing and planning a move from VMware or physical servers to AWS. Its assessments now cover storage as well as servers.
- Attached disks are included in every assessment and priced on Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store, AWS's virtual disks).
- Detached storage, such as file shares, storage arrays and object stores, can be added by uploading an RVTools export, NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights query exports, or the AWS Transform Assessment Data template.
- File storage (file servers and NAS, or network-attached storage) maps to Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP. Block storage maps to Amazon EBS. Object and backup storage maps to Amazon S3.
- AWS says you need "at least 7 days" of collected data, and up to 30 days to capture peaks.
- Each storage assessment prices a single AWS Region. If you specify no Region or more than one, the assessment stops with an error.
Other AWS Transform changes in the same period: on 6 November 2026 assessments and migration planning were combined into one job, so you can build a business case and plan migration waves from the same inventory. On 16 October 2026 AWS Transform for migrations became available in Asia Pacific (Singapore).
What it means for your migration
Storage is often the part of a VMware move that gets sized last and costs the most surprise. This makes it easier to get a first estimate early.
- Export RVTools from vCenter now and keep it with your current-state architecture. You will reuse it for server and storage sizing.
- Choose one Region per assessment. Pick the Region you plan to run in, which for most Australian workloads is Asia Pacific (Sydney) or Asia Pacific (Melbourne). Run a separate assessment if you want to compare Regions.
- Review the flagged idle volumes. AWS keeps them in the estimate but marks them, because they are "often candidates for archiving or decommissioning". Deleting them before you move cuts both cost and copy time.
- Treat the output as a starting point. AWS fills missing fields with defaults and assumes 50 per cent of a volume is used when no figure is given. Check the big file shares by hand before you sign off a budget in the TCO template.