100 Days of Cloud — Day 18: Azure Migrate

Its Day 18 of my 100 Days of Cloud journey. Yesterday, I attended an Azure Immersion Workshop on Azure Migrate hosted by Insight UK.

Azure Immersion Workshops are a great way to get hand-on access to Azure Technologies in a Sandbox environment with full instructor support. You require a business email address, or an address linked to an active Azure Subscription in order to avail of the full lab experience.

If you simply type “Azure Immersion Workshop” into a Google Search, you will find a list of Microsoft Partners that are running Azure Immersion Workshops in the coming months. This is a full day course, but is well worthwhile if you don’t have or don’t want to use your own on-premise resources to learn the technology.

Azure Migrate Overview

Azure Migrate is an Azure technology which automates planning and migration of your on-premise servers from Hyper-V, VMware or Physical Server environments.

Azure Migrate is broken into the following sections:

• Discover — this uses a lightweight VM appliance that can be run on a VM or a Physical server in your on-premise infrastructure. This appliance runs the discovery of VMs and Physical Servers in your environment. Discovery is agentless, so nothing is installed on servers in your environment.
• Assessment — once the discovery is completed, you can then run an assessment based on this. The assessment will make recommendations for the target Azure VM size based on what was discovered. This useful to know if you have over/under provisioned resources in your environment, as the assessment will size them correctly based on demand and workloads. Because of this, it is better to run the discovery at normal business hours to get a full overview of your environment.
• Migrate — this is the point where you can discover the VMs you want to migrate. The first step is to replicate them to Azure on a Test Migration to ensure everything is working as expected. Azure will also flag any issues that have been detected on VMs so that you can remediate. Once this is completed and you are happy that everything is in place, you can run a full VM Migration.
• Containerize — You can also use Azure Migrate to containerize Java web apps and ASP.NET apps that are running on premise and migrate these to either Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) or Azure App Services.

Azure Migrate also integrates with a number of ISV’s (Independent Software Vendors) such as Carbonite, Lakeside, UnifyCloud and Zerto to offer additional support for assessment and migration of servers.

There are 2 great benefits to using Azure Migrate.

• Firstly, the first 30 days of Discover is free so you have time to plan multiple different scenarios in your migration journey.
• Secondly, this also integrates with the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) Calculator to give a full cost breakdown of what hosting in Azure will cost to your organization.

The full description of Azure Migrate and all of its offerings and services can be found here at Microsoft Docs. And as I said above, the best way to get the full experience is to find a local partner that’s running an Azure Immersion Workshop in your area of time zone.

Hope you enjoyed this post, until next time!!