Migrate from Milvus to Zilliz Cloud Via Endpoint

Zilliz Cloud offers Milvus as a fully managed, cloud-hosted solution for users who want to use the Milvus vector database without the need to manage the infrastructure themselves. This topic describes how to migrate from Milvus via the database endpoint.

Prerequisites

Before starting your Milvus to Zilliz Cloud migration, ensure you meet these requirements:

Milvus requirements

Requirement	Details
Version compatibility	Milvus 2.3.6 or later
Network access	Source Milvus instance must be accessible from the public internet
Authentication credentials	Username and password if authentication is enabled (refer to Authenticate User Access)

Zilliz Cloud requirements

Requirement	Details
User role	Organization Owner or Project Admin
Cluster capacity	Sufficient storage and compute resources (use the CU calculator to estimate CU size)
Network access	Add Zilliz Cloud IPs to allowlists if using network restrictions

Getting started

The following demo walks you through how to start migrating from Milvus via endpoint:

Notes

• If full text search is already enabled for the source collection, Zilliz Cloud will preserve its Function settings in the target collection after migration. These inherited settings cannot be modified.

• You can also enable full text search for other VARCHAR fields during migration. For details, refer to Full Text Search.

Index settings

At the final confirmation step, use Index settings to choose how this migration job handles indexes for the target collections.

• Create indexes after migration is enabled by default. Leave it on to automatically create indexes according to the existing migration rules.

• Turn it off to skip index creation and build indexes later, for example during a planned maintenance window.

Note

If you turn off Create indexes after migration, no vector or scalar indexes are created by the migration job. Migrated collections remain Unloaded and cannot be searched or queried until you manually create indexes and load the collections.

Review the index setting in the confirmation information before clicking Migrate.

Monitor the migration process

Once you click Migrate, a migration job will be generated. You can check the migration progress on the Jobs page. When the job status switches from In Progress to Successful, the migration is complete.

If you skip index creation, the job details show Indexes skipped after a successful migration. Follow the post-migration steps to create indexes and load the collections.

Post-migration

After the migration job completes successfully, prepare the target collections for searches and queries:

• Automatic index creation enabled: The migration job creates AUTOINDEX according to the existing Milvus migration rules. Verify that index creation succeeded in the job details.

• Index creation skipped: The migration job creates neither vector nor scalar indexes. Manually create indexes on all vector fields, and create scalar indexes as needed for your workload. For a REST API example, see Create Index (V2).

• Manual loading required: After index creation completes, manually load each collection and wait until it is loaded before running searches or queries. This step is required whether indexes were created automatically or manually. See Load & Release.

Notes

Once your collection is loaded, verify that the number of collections and entities in the target cluster matches the data source. If discrepancies are found, delete the collections with missing entities and re-migrate them.

Cancel migration job

If the migration process encounters any issues, you can take the following steps to troubleshoot and resume the migration:

1

On the Jobs page, identify the failed migration job and cancel it.

2

Click View Details in the Actions column to access the error log.