Azure Migration

Azure Migration

A migration of your resources to the Azure platform can be broken down into four phases: assessment, migration, optimization, and security and management. The assessment phase is where you clearly define your objectives and priorities. It is similar to a design phase where you document what you want and then plan the steps required to achieve them.

This is where you would want to engage a project manager who would break down the objectives into steps and apply a timeline. The timeline would include the items identified as priorities to make sure they are by all means completed when required.

you need to assess which changes, , are required for the migration to be successful. For example, does your workload require a specific version of an operating system, require registry changes, or require some kind of third-party framework? This is the phase to discover such things and then identify which compute resource or group of resources are available and/or required to successfully migrate the workload to Azure. There are some tools that can analyze your current solution and generate a report containing some issues you may have with your migration. Consider employing the following:

• Azure Migrate for a compute server assessment
• Azure Data Migration Assistant (DMA) to examine your data stores
• Azure App Service migration assessment for your web applications
• Azure Data Migration Service (DMS)

The migration phase is where you execute the plan you created in the assessment phase. lift and shift means that you do not plan on making any changes to your workload and want to run it just like it works on-premise but on the Azure platform. When doing a lift and shift, the range of possible changes you can make are limited to only a few cloud optimizations, such as increasing the amount of available compute power like CPU and RAM.

Some tools helpful for actually performing the migration follow:

• Azure Site Recovery
• Azure Migrate
• Azure Data Migration Service (DMS)
• Import/Export

Example : FTP or RDP.

Using the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is an example of a basic but useful tool for moving files of many different types and purposes between servers. There may also be some activities for which there exists no deployment tool. Their deployment must be performed manually via a Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) connection to an Azure virtual machine.

it is time to optimize your workloads to make sure your consumption and costs are falling in line with expectations. Two ways to achieve optimization are Azure Hybrid Benefit and Azure Reserved Virtual Machine Instances.

The other way to optimize is by using Azure Cost Management and Cloudy. Navigate to the Subscription blade and select the Azure subscription that you want to assess. Click the Cost Analysis link in the navigation menu. Notice that it provides both a current and forecasted view of the charges.

you will find the breakdown of charges based on the service name such as Azure VM, App Service, Azure Cosmos DB, and the like; the location such as South Central US (SN1), North Europe (DB3), and others; and the resource group name. All three of these cost breakdown reports will provide you great insights into where your Azure spend is being consumed. Then you can match that with the expectations you defined at the beginning of the migration process in the assessment phase.

The final phase of the migration is making sure the workloads remain secure and functional. From a security perspective, you should test often. Ensure that your RBAC restrictions still restrict CRUD activities within your subscription. Regularly check that your Azure Policies are still in compliance with your corporate and industry requirements.

Lastly, consider the implementation of malware detection and other security-related IT solutions into your workloads.

Microsoft cannot know if the behaviors on your application are expected or not and if Microsoft takes an action that shuts down your workloads wrongly, which would be a problem. Therefore, application security is primarily the responsibility of the customer and not the provider. The management of your IT solution on Azure has to do with the monitoring and recovery capabilities of your applications.

The tools of choice are Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, Application Insights, and Azure Backup.

Now that you know the phases of a typical, generic process to migrate your IT solution to Azure. The following products will be discussed in more detail in the next sections:

• Azure Site Recovery
• Azure Migrate
• Migrating Azure Virtual Machines
• Azure Data Migration Service (DMS)
• Migrating Azure App Services
• Import/Export

Azure Site Recovery:

A process for migrating an on-premise VMware, a Hyper-V virtual machine, or a physical machine to Azure can be achieved by using the Azure Site Recovery tool. You achieve the migration by configuring a disaster recovery scenario between the on-premise machine and one on the Azure platform.

Once configured and tested, you could purposely trigger a failover that would move the workload to the Azure platform. That is a valid migration approach and may be less impactful than using Azure Migrate. Consider the point that if you failover and it doesn’t work, then you have the option of flicking a switch and the traffic is set back to the original on-premise architecture.

Azure Site Recovery also supports the migration from Azure Stack workloads, which is a product for enterprises to run Azure in their own private data centers.

The ASR Deployment Planner can help migrate VMware virtual machines to Azure. This tool will help analyze the existing VM from a disk number, disk size, IOPS, BIOS, and OS version to help determine whether the VM is compliant with Azure VMs.

Azure Migrate

Azure Migrate provides a simplified migration, modernization, and optimization service for Azure. All pre-migration steps such as discovery, assessments, and right-sizing of on-premises resources are included for infrastructure, data, and applications. Azure Migrate’s extensible framework allows for integration of third-party tools, thus expanding the scope of supported use-cases. It provides the following:

• Unified migration platform: A single portal to start, run, and track your migration to Azure.
• Range of tools: A range of tools for assessment and migration. Azure Migrate tools include Azure Migrate: Discovery and assessment and Azure Migrate: Server Migration. Azure Migrate also integrates with other Azure services and tools, and with independent software vendor (ISV) offerings.
• Assessment, migration and modernization: In the Azure Migrate hub, you can assess, migrate, and modernize:
  • Servers, databases and web apps: Assess on-premises servers including web apps and SQL Server instances and migrate them to Azure virtual machines or Azure VMware Solution (AVS) (Preview).
  • Databases: Assess on-premises SQL Server instances and databases to migrate them to an SQL Server on an Azure VM or an Azure SQL Managed Instance or to an Azure SQL Database.
  • Web applications: Assess on-premises web applications and migrate them to Azure App Service and Azure Kubernetes Service.
  • Virtual desktops: Assess your on-premises virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and migrate it to Azure Virtual Desktop.
  • Data: Migrate large amounts of data to Azure quickly and cost-effectively using Azure Data Box products.

The Azure Migrate hub includes these tools:

Azure Migrate: Discovery and assessment          

Discover and assess servers including SQL and web apps. Discover and assess on-premises servers running on VMware, Hyper-V, and physical servers in preparation for migration to Azure.

Azure Migrate: Server Migration

Migrate servers, Migrate VMware VMs, Hyper-V VMs, physical servers, other virtualized servers, and public cloud VMs to Azure.

Data Migration Assistant            

Assess SQL Server databases for migration to Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Managed Instance, or Azure VMs running SQL Server.       

Data Migration Assistant is a stand-alone tool to assess SQL Servers. It helps pinpoint potential problems blocking migration. It identifies unsupported features, new features that can benefit you after migration, and the right path for database migration

Azure Database Migration Service          

Migrate on-premises databases to Azure VMs running SQL Server, Azure SQL Database, or SQL Managed Instances

Web app migration assistant     

Assess on-premises web apps and migrate them to Azure. Azure App Service Migration Assistant is a standalone tool to assess on-premises websites for migration to Azure App Service.

Azure Data Box

Migrate offline data, Use Azure Data Box products to move large amounts of offline data to Azure