Cloud Digital Leader Practice Question: Google Cloud products, services, and solutions
A company wants to migrate its existing on-premises virtual machines (VMware VMs) to Google Cloud with minimal changes to the operating system and applications. Which Google Cloud product is specifically designed for migrating on-premises VMs to Google Cloud with minimal modification?
⚠ Common exam trap
Google Cloud often tests the distinction between general-purpose data transfer or processing services (like Dataflow or Storage Transfer Service) and specialized migration tools, tempting candidates to pick a familiar service that sounds plausible but lacks the specific VM migration capability.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Migrate to Virtual Machines (formerly Velostrata), which migrates on-premises VMware VMs to Compute Engine with minimal modification and downtime
Migrate to Virtual Machines (formerly Velostrata) is the correct choice because it is specifically designed to migrate on-premises VMware VMs to Compute Engine with minimal modification to the OS and applications. It uses a streaming migration approach that moves the VM's disk state incrementally while keeping the VM running, resulting in minimal downtime and no need to re-architect the workloads.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Migrate to Virtual Machines (formerly Velostrata), which migrates on-premises VMware VMs to Compute Engine with minimal modification and downtime
Why this is correct
Migrate to Virtual Machines is the purpose-built service for this. It performs VM migrations from VMware (and other sources) to Compute Engine, handling the OS and application translation automatically. The 'minimal changes' requirement is the defining characteristic — it's a lift-and-shift migration tool.
- ✗
Cloud Dataflow, by streaming data from on-premises VMs to Google Cloud storage
Why it's wrong here
Cloud Dataflow is a unified stream and batch data processing service that executes pipelines over data in Pub/Sub, BigQuery, and Cloud Storage. It does not interact with the hypervisor layer or perform OS-level conversion, guest-agent injection, or boot-disk preparation. Streaming VM files into GCS might move raw data, but it would not re-create a bootable Compute Engine instance or preserve the VM's identity, configuration, and state. Therefore, it cannot satisfy the requirement to migrate VMware VMs with minimal modification and downtime.
- ✗
Anthos, by registering on-premises Kubernetes clusters with Google Cloud's management plane
Why it's wrong here
Anthos is a hybrid and multi-cloud platform that provides consistent Kubernetes-based application deployment and policy management across on-premises and Google Cloud environments. While Anthos can bring up GKE clusters in VMware and register them with the cloud, it targets containerized workloads and does not translate VMware virtual machines into Compute Engine instances. Migrating non-containerized VMs requires re-packaging the OS and application into a container image or using a migration service; Anthos simply does not perform that lift-and-shift conversion. Thus, it is not the correct tool for migrating existing VMware VMs with minimal changes.
- ✗
Cloud Storage Transfer Service, by copying VM disk images from on-premises storage to Cloud Storage
Why it's wrong here
Storage Transfer Service moves data (files, objects) from storage systems. While VM disk images are files, the Transfer Service doesn't handle VM migration — it would just copy the image, not handle the conversion and boot configuration needed to run it in Compute Engine.
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Cloud Digital Transformation
Key term
Compute Engine
Compute Engine is Google Cloud's Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering that lets you create and run virtual machines on Google's infrastructure.
Key term
Google Cloud
Google Cloud is a suite of cloud computing services offered by Google that provides infrastructure, platform, and software solutions over the internet.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This GCDL practice question is part of Courseiva's free Google Cloud certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the GCDL exam.