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Guide For Azure Migration Planning

Posted by Errin O'Connor on Jul, 02, 2021 03:07

Guide For Azure Migration Planning

With the tough competition in the business world, you should develop the best solutions to enhance your business operations. Among the widely used technologies, today is Azure Migrate. It is a service by Microsoft that can help enterprises assess how their on-premises workloads perform and how much is the cost of hosting to Azure public cloud. Is Azure Migrate right for your business? Read more to learn about Azure Migration Planning. 

What is Azure Migrate? 

Azure Migrate can be your efficient partner for planning a cloud migration. It can also help you explore VMware VMs that run on their own data centers like CPU and memory usage and performance history. With Azure Migrate, you can also conduct dependency mapping to visualize the resource dependencies of a group or single VMs. 

Azure Migrate can also offer you a centralized hub for assessment and migration to Azure on-premises servers, applications, infrastructure, and data.

Azure Migrate can provide you with:

  1. Various tools: With the platform, you can access different tools for migration and assessment. Some of these tools include Server Migration, Discovery and assessment, and other tools and services with software vendor offerings. 
  2. Unified migration platform: It can offer a single portal to run, start and track migration to Azure. 

Assessment and migration 

With Azure Migrate, you can migrate and assess:

  • Databases – assessment of on-premises databases and migrate it to SQL Managed Instance or Azure SQL Database
  • Linux, Windows, and SQL Server – assessment of servers like SQL Server instances and migrate it to Azure VMware Solution or Azure virtual machines 
  • Web applications – assessment of applications on the web and migrate it to Azure App Service with Azure App Service Migration Assistant
  • Data – migration of big data amount to Azure cost-effectively and fast using Azure Data Box products 
  • Virtual desktops – assessment of on-premises virtual desktop infrastructure and migrate them to Azure’s Windows Virtual Desktop
Azure Migration Planning

Do you plan to use Azure for your business? Then, here is a guide for Azure Migration Planning.

Azure Migration Planning 

Migration of your data center to Azure is a huge investment for your business. It can help to improve agility, productivity and lower costs in your business. The following are the steps on how to have successful Azure Migration Planning. 

  • Discover: The first step for Azure Migration Planning is discovery. You need to identify all existing applications and workloads in your infrastructure. With this, you can prepare them for the migration process. It can be a tedious and extensive procedure but essential for success.  Missed workloads and apps can be a problem, later on, so make sure to have up-to-date and complete application inventory. In the discovery process, you can review the following:
  • Storage Solutions: Buying new storage as you reach capacity can be a burden. Well, there are various types of Azure storage you can consider based on your data. 
  • Hot vs. cold: It is a multi-temperature data management solution that will help you to reduce costs. Cold data can be stored on the slowest storage, while hot data needs fast storage. 
  • Premium vs. standard: Premium storage can offer low-latency disk support for virtual machines with input/ output-intensive workloads but can provide high-performance. On the other hand, standard Azure storage comes with an IOPS maximum for every virtual disk. 
last three steps
  • Virtual Networks: If you want to keep similar data center security, performance, and stability while handling costs, you can analyze your workloads in your current physical or virtual environment. Then, you can compare them to Azure resources. It is also essential to address the requirements for networking; subnets require to provide or if you’ll offer DNS servers through Active Directory
  • Compute : You can also have easy access to compute resources in the cloud. In planning, you should prefer Azure Autoscale. This feature can scale apps to meet the shifting performance requirements. Moreover, Azure virtual machines also allow you to manage your computing environment. Azure VM offers virtualization without purchasing and maintaining expensive physical hardware. 
  • Assess: The next step for Azure Migration Planning is assessment. After you learned about the products of Azure and how they can fit for your migration, assess your present infrastructure.
Azure Compute

You can use the following tools:

Microsoft Virtual Machine Readiness Assessment tool 

With this tool, you can check your on-premises virtualized or physical environment. It also offers a checklist to move the workloads into the cloud. Once the assessment process is done, the tool will generate a report about the details of workload configuration/ attributes ready to transfer. It will also provide you with what needs to be investigated before moving. The report can also give other resources for resolving issues and workload preparation for a migration to Azure. 

Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) toolkit 

MAP toolkit is an agentless assessment, inventory, and reporting tool that can assess IT environments securely for other platform migrations such as Windows 7, Windows 8.1, SQL Server 2014, Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track, and more. This toolkit can offer readiness details for virtual and physical workloads migrating to Azure. 

With these tools, you can review and document all workloads, apps, and processes you use. These include:

  • Performance requirements: Understand the IOPS you need to prevent lags and keep the same performance with your new Azure environment. 
  • Current infrastructure: Map your physical and virtual system configurations to Azure instance. You can also have specs evaluation such as disk size, CPUs, and storage demand.  
  • High availability/ resilience requirements: You need to have a system that will serve in times of failure. It is also essential to carefully document the disaster recovery procedures, recovery time objectives, and resiliency configurations to make sure that you can restore your data quickly in the new environment. 
  • Current network architecture and capacity: You can have an assessment of capacity and network architecture for the evaluation of bandwidth to replicate changes on virtual machines. You can also use bandwidth assessment or a capacity planning tool to know if replication of virtual machines can kill your network. 
  • Maintenance process: As you move to Azure, know the maintenance actions you need to stay running effectively. Find out the best maintenance process to change in the new cloud environment. 

Target

You can now map how to get Azure servers. The three targets for your workloads include Office 365, a Cloud OS Network, and Microsoft Azure. You can migrate communication and productivity-related workloads to Office 365. Moreover, you can also move an email to Microsoft Exchange Online, move instant messaging, video, voice, and shared app communications to Skype for Business Online, and document management to SharePoint Online. 

You may also consider the following for Azure migration planning:

Factors including ease of migration, speed, desired functionality, and cost 

Azure Cost

These factors can inform the cloud location for your workloads. You can benefit from the speed of Azure elastic storage, data centers, processing memory, and power. These factors are also essential to make responsive sites even on the peak demand.

  • Operating systems : Is the workload you want to migrate runs an Azure-supported operating system. Check that the VM you’re migrating will not pass 32 score or maximum 448GB allowable memory. 
  • Virtual machines: VMs are on the side of internet connection and associated with the unpredictable nature of internet latency. Some businesses migrate non-critical VMs to more affordable cloud resources. 

Do you still see workloads running on physical servers? 

Some conversions of physical server workloads to VM aren’t direct. So, you can work with an effective partner to streamline the process. 

Migrate 

After the preparation and auditing of existing apps and workloads, you can now migrate to Azure. You can learn the best practices, prepare for trial and error, and available tools. Make sure to get the right expertise when it comes to a complex cloud migration. 

Azure migration can give many benefits to your business. These include the following:

  • Enhanced IT infrastructure: Azure cloud infrastructure can offer different technology advantages, including speed, cost, flexibility, and scalability. 
  • Enhanced speed : With Azure, you can improve the speed of deployment of infrastructure resources and application releases. 
  • Performance and scalability: Azure comes with the foundational architecture of unified and shared resources. So, it can scale quickly and manage different workloads at high performance. 
  • Deployment flexibility: Applications in Azure are ideal for companies with fluctuating or growing needs. 
  • Improve productivity: It can also help your business productivity. The platform can support different languages, operating systems, and databases. In addition, it also has DevTest labs that provide fast provisioning of development and QA environments. 
  • Reliable and secure cloud platform: You don’t need to worry about your security since Azure Migrate is a trusted and secure cloud platform. With this, you can keep your business processes while using Azure. 
  • Reporting and analytics features: Azure also comes with analytics and reporting features. So, you can deliver insights that can help to improve your business.
Azure Migration Planning

Conclusion  To sum it up, Azure Migration Planning can be simple if you follow the steps mentioned above. With Azure migration, you can enhance the productivity and profitability of your business. If you’re ready to grow your business, it is time for you to prefer Azure Migration. It can be less expensive to improve your business processes. With its functional tools, you can meet your company’s needs and enhance the collaboration of your team.

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Errin O'Connor
About the Author

Errin O'Connor

With over 25 years of experience in Information Technology and Management Consulting, Errin O’Connor has led hundreds of large-scale enterprise implementations from Business Intelligence, Power BI, Office 365, SharePoint, Exchange, IT Security, Azure and Hybrid Cloud efforts for over 165 Fortune 500 companies.

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