Simon Hearne
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VectorDB Zilliz Milvus talk

Migrating to Milvus: Tooling, Deployment Choices and Lessons from Real Migrations

How to move from Elasticsearch or OpenSearch to Milvus or Zilliz Cloud: migration tooling, a real end-to-end walkthrough, deployment choices, and lessons from real customer migrations.
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This is the follow-up to Milvus 3.0: Closing the Search Gap. If you are moving self-managed Milvus rather than Elasticsearch, see Migrating Self-managed Milvus to Managed Milvus.

About the webinar

Milvus 3.0 expands the range of search workloads teams can run in Milvus, with stronger full-text retrieval plus in-engine sorting, aggregation and faceting. In the previous webinar I explored these search improvements and compared Elasticsearch and Milvus with live side-by-side queries.

In this follow-up session I move from comparison to migration. I show how Zilliz Migration Service helps move data from Elasticsearch or OpenSearch into Milvus or Zilliz Cloud, then walk through a real migration workflow. I also compare Elastic Cloud (ESS) and Zilliz Cloud, discuss deployment options across open-source Milvus, Zilliz Cloud and Zilliz BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud), and share lessons from customer migrations.

If you use Elasticsearch or OpenSearch today and are considering a migration, this is the walkthrough for you.

What's covered

  • The migration path. The major stages and decisions in an Elasticsearch or OpenSearch migration to Milvus or Zilliz Cloud.
  • Migration tooling and a real walkthrough. How VTS (the open-source migration tool) and Zilliz Migration Service (the managed service built on VTS) move Elasticsearch and OpenSearch data, followed by a real migration workflow end to end.
  • Licensing and commercial tradeoffs. Licensing models and the commercial considerations behind Elastic Cloud (ESS) and Zilliz Cloud.
  • Deployment choices. Open-source Milvus, Zilliz Cloud and Zilliz BYOC compared across operating model, control and security needs.
  • Customer migration stories. Why real teams moved, how they approached the migration, and what they learned along the way.
  • Live AMA. Around 20 minutes of migration, architecture and evaluation questions.

Presented as a Zilliz webinar on 2 September 2026.