Cloud Native
How to Migrate Data Centers with Azure Migrate
Previously, migrating your servers to the cloud was a huge undertaking, but with Azure Migrate, you get services to discover, assess, and migrate your server. See how you can utilize these tools to make your cloud journey a little less daunting.
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With recent innovation in Azure public cloud services, it makes now more than ever the time to start thinking about migrating your servers from your on-premises infrastructure to the cloud.
In the past, this was a huge undertaking. You needed months of planning to create a lift and shift migration strategy, countless meetings, tooling, setup, and associated staff to do the heavy lifting which coined a new term “lift and shift migration”. What does that mean? This is the first step most companies take into a larger world of public cloud (sorry Ben Ken-obi). Basically, you are disconnecting your on-premises data centre, which consists of physical servers or perhaps virtual servers and shipping, and migrating those workloads to the public cloud. This is not a decision to take lightly, but like my grand pappy always said, there’s always a tool for the job!
Azure has a dedicated service to help with that called Azure Migrate. Azure Migrate has a centralised hub of services to discover, assess, and actually migrate your server workloads to Azure. An example is pictured below from my personal Azure Dashboard on the initial setup screen.
It’s always good to start with a goal and to follow up by testing that goal to see if it’s even feasible. So, with that in mind, lets start with a simple server migration goal to get started. To do this, go ahead and select Servers out of the list on the left navigation and choose the Add tool(s) button.
Next, you are going to want to fill out some basic information such as your Azure subscription where you want the migration to take place. You will also want to name your test resource group on where you want your migration to end up in your selected Azure Subscription. You will also want to name your migration project accordingly.
After that, you will be asked if you want to be utilising the Azure assessment and migration tools, and as an alternative third party supported assessment and migration tools. For this article today, we are going to be utilising the Azure tool set for both assessment and migration as shown in the attached selection and summary screen.
Congratulations! Once you have these tools added to your project your screen should look like the screenshot below. The assessment tools will allow you to assess your machines to make sure they are ready for migration by using the included appliance. The migration tools will allow you to migrate and replicate your server to Azure. So now you have the tools configured for your subscription to use and a test project to play around with.
With these tools, you can easily tap into your on-premises environment, whether that is Vmware Vsphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, and physical servers with the guided wizards. The wizards give you guided paths to assess your workloads via the virtual appliances and migrate and monitor your migrated workloads. These wizards are step-by-step instructions for you to follow that assess estimated costs and then replicate to Azure. This is both for supported Windows and Linux servers.
Hopefully, utilising these great tools in your Azure subscription will make daunting tasks more feasible in your cloud journey ahead. Happy experimenting with lifting and shifting!
References based for this article:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/migrate/migrate-services-overview
