What is it?
Azure Migrate is a Microsoft service that helps small, medium or big companies assess their on-premises environment and plan for moving all or some of it into the cloud.
How does it do it?
Azure Migrate sets up a migration discovery project which goes off and discovers and assesses your on-premises servers, databases, including the data, or Web Apps and can even assess your virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and migrate it into Azure Virtual Desktop with the click of a button.
You must deploy an Azure Migrate appliance to allow Azure Migrate to do this discovery and this can be either on a Virtual Machine in Azure or a physical server in your Datacentre.
The tool to discover and assess your on-premises servers will then check whether it:
- Is ready to move into Azure.
- What the current specification is of your on-premises server and choose an estimated Azure Virtual Machine size that will handle everything in the cloud.
- Estimates the cost of running your old on-premises server in Azure.
- Checks if the on-premises server has any dependencies, i.e. a SQL Database that either runs on that machine or another server.
What the discovery data looks like
As you can see from the example screenshot above you get the following information:
Name – Machine name
IP Address – what the on-premises IP address is
Software Inventory – what software is installed on this server and also needs migrating across
Dependencies – what ports are used by this server and also need configuring on your new Azure Virtual Machine
SQL Instances – if any SQL Instances exist on the server and the details of them
Web Apps – does the server have any?
Cores – How many CPU cores does the server have?
Memory – How much memory (RAM) does the server have
Disks – How many disk drives does the server have
Next steps
It is now for the company who runs the discovery tool to analyse this data and decide which servers are ready to move to Azure and which ones they want to move.
Once the servers are chosen these are the steps you need to think about
- Replicate the on-premises server in preparation for migration to the cloud.
- Test the Azure Migrate process.
- Perform the Azure Migrate process.
- Validate and test the newly provisioned Azure Virtual Machine.
