Thinking about Datacenter Migration with Azure — Part 1
In another post I wrote about the cloud journey and the need to build a hybrid model of Cloud, one step behind let’s think for a minute If we talking about a cloud journey is necessary to think about migration specifically Data Center Migration.
There are a lot of reasons why to migrate a Datacenter some are related of technology obsolescence, some are from compliance requirements, other are related an urgent capacity need. I´m thinking in operational optimization, reduction of hardware support and licensing, just one more: application development and modernization.
Any of those reasons that you may match, it’s necessary to build a strategy that starts with a planning and finished with management in new (Cloud) infrastructure. How approach cloud migration?
The migration can be divided on three stages:
Rehost: also known as “lift and shift” basically is migration of physical and virtualized server “as-is” to the cloud
Refactor: also known as “cloud optimization” this phase involves using additional services (cloud provider services) to optimize the cost, sometimes reliability and performance this is possible “refactoring your applications”
Rebuild: also known as “application modernization” this means to use PaaS or sometimes SaaS services, this is the hardest phase because you add new functionality or to rearchitect the application for the cloud.
Azure has an unique approach to drive this journey for the 3 stages mentioned before
Is necessary always to know and understand about current infrastructure; starting for how many servers are we going to migrate, which IP Address management is using, storage regarding type of tiering and sizes. With current management tools you may have a good information about the infrastructure; but to star any migration you´ll need a discovery mechanism can be used for next steps on migration, discover servers and VMs is usually a straightforward process, it relies on interaction directly with the endpoint (using an agent) or managing hypervisor (such a vSphere or Hyper-V).
As part of the Azure subscription for all customers, Microsoft provides “Azure Migrate” to assist in discovery and assessment, there are also many supporting partner discovery tools that can help accurately map on-premises relationships. These tools can also help you with usage characteristics like CPU, memory, and storage to equivalent on Azure environments, giving you the technical and business reporting needed to continue your migrations plans.
Key features of Azure Migrate:
· Assess Azure readiness: Assess whether your on-premises machines are suitable for running in Azure.
· Get size recommendations: Get size recommendations for Azure VMs based on the performance history of on-premises VMs.
· Estimate monthly costs: Get estimated costs for running on-premises machines in Azure.
· Migrate with high confidence: Visualize dependencies of on-premises machines to create groups of machines that you will assess and migrate together.
Here more partners and tools that can help in the assessment (some of them will help in next steps):