Design, Planning and Execution of Migration to Azure Cloud
The actual process of migrating to Azure can be overwhelming but it does not have to be. It is important to analyse the needs of your company to determine whether you should move all your data at once or whether you need to rework before migrating. Azure Migrate is a service that helps you migrate to the cloud. Azure Migrate is known for having a minimal impact on business function and having a high return on investment. Azure Migrate can also help you assess how your workloads will perform and how much it will cost to host them in the cloud. It provides a centralized location to track the assessment and migration of your infrastructure, data, and applications to the cloud.
You can use a framework of Assess, Migrate, Optimize, and Monitor as a path for migration. Each stage focuses on an aspect of ensuring the success of a migration.
1. Assess
Discovery and Evaluation
Start with a full assessment of your current environment. Identify the servers, applications, and services that are in scope for migration. You can then bring in the IT and business teams that work with those services.
Next, produce a full inventory and dependency map of servers and services that are in scope for migration. The inventory and map determine how those services communicate with each other. Each application must be fully investigated before any work takes place.
Involve key stakeholders
Applications are used by specific sections of the business. The owners and superusers of applications have a wealth of experience to call on. Involving these people in the planning stage increases the chance of a successful migration. These resources can offer guidance in areas where the person running the migration project might have knowledge gaps.
Estimate cost savings
Part of the business’s plan to migrate to Azure could be to reduce costs, because moving to the cloud offers cost savings over running your own on-premises estate. After you complete the initial scoping exercise, use the Azure Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator to estimate the real costs.
Identify Tools
Several tools and services are available to help you plan and complete the four stages of migration. In some migrations, you may only need to use one or two of these tools.
| Service or tool | Stage | Use |
| Azure Migrate | Assess and migrate | Perform assessment and migration of VMware VMs, Hyper-V VMs, cloud VMs, and physical servers, as well as databases, data, virtual desktop infrastructure, and web applications, to Azure. |
| Azure TCO Calculator | Assess | Estimates your monthly running costs in Azure versus on-premises. |
| Azure Database Migration Service | Migrate | Uses the Data Migration Assistant and the Azure portal to migrate database workloads to Azure. |
| Azure Cost Management | Optimize | Helps you monitor, control, and optimize ongoing Azure costs. |
| Azure Advisor | Optimize | Helps optimize your Azure resources for high availability, performance, and cost. |
| Azure Monitor | Monitor | Enables you to monitor your entire estate’s performance. Includes application-health monitoring via enhanced telemetry and setting up notifications. |
2. Migrate
Strategize Your Cloud Migration with Azure – WhiteBlue Cloud Services Blog
Migrate workloads
It is often best to start with a small migration instead of migrating a large, business-critical workload. This approach lets you become familiar with the tools, processes, and procedures for migration. It can reduce the risk of issues when you migrate larger workloads. As you become more comfortable with the migration process, you can progress to larger and more business-critical workloads.
Each tool will guide you through the migration. The steps to complete them are covered in later units. At a high level, the steps are:
- Prepare the source (vCenter Server) and target (Azure) environments.
- Set up and start the replication between the two.
- Test that the replication has worked.
- Fail over from the source servers to Azure.
For the database migrations, the high-level steps are:
- Assess your on-premises databases.
- Migrate the schemas.
- Create and run an Azure Database Migration Service project to move the data.
- Monitor the migration.
Decommission on-premises infrastructure
After all migrated workloads have been tested and verified as successfully migrated to Azure, you can decommission all your on-premises systems. Even after you decommission them, it can be useful to keep backups and archive data from the migrated systems. This practice gives you a historical archive of data in case it is needed. This data could be stored on-premises, or in a cloud-storage service such as Azure Blob storage.
3. Optimize
After your services are migrated, it is important to optimize them to ensure that they’re running as efficiently as possible from a cost and performance standpoint.
Analyse Running Costs
Use Azure Cost Management to start analysing your Azure costs at different management scopes. For example, by choosing a subscription in the portal, you can see a breakdown of all the resources for that subscription. Or you could view a resource group to see all the costs associated with all the resources in just the selected group:
4. Monitor
Azure Monitor helps you maximize the availability and performance of your applications and services. It delivers a comprehensive solution for collecting, analyzing, and acting on telemetry from your cloud and on-premises environments. This information helps you understand how your applications are performing and proactively identify issues affecting them and the resources they depend on.
Just a few examples of what you can do with Azure Monitor include:
• Detect and diagnose issues across applications and dependencies with Application Insights.
• Correlate infrastructure issues with VM insights and Container insights.
• Drill into your monitoring data with Log Analytics for troubleshooting and deep diagnostics.
• Support operations at scale with smart alerts and automated actions.
• Create visualizations with Azure dashboards and workbooks.
• Collect data from monitored resources using Azure Monitor Metrics.
By now, you could have got an insight on how to devise your Migration strategy by leveraging the Assess, Migrate, Optimize, and Monitor Framework. Wondering how to assess your environment consisting of various resources prior to migration and the actual steps involved in performing the migration? No worries! We sensed your zealousness and got them covered in the subsequent blogs. Stay tuned with us as we’ll be posting those blogs soon. Also, don’t forget to follow our LinkedIn page if you are a cloud enthusiast (if you aren’t a cloud enthusiast, then you can become one by following us????).
