AZURE MIGRATION PLANNING

Discovery involves identifying all existing workloads and applications in your infrastructure so you can prepare them for migration. It’s an extensive and tedious process, but critical to success.

Missed applications and workloads can become headaches later on, so you’ll want to make sure your application inventory is complete and up-to-date.

Review these areas during the preparation phase:

Virtual Networks

To maintain the same datacenter performance, security and stability while managing costs, analyze your on-premises workloads in your existing virtual or physical environment and compare them to equivalent resources in Azure. Be sure to address networking requirements, how many subnets you’ll need to provision, and whether you’ll provide your own DNS servers via Active Directory.

Storage Solution

Purchasing new storage every time you reach capacity is a constant burden. There are a few types of Azure storage to consider depending on the nature of your data.

Standard vs. premium: Regular Azure storage has a certain IOPS maximum for each virtual disk. Premium storage delivers high-performance, low-latency disk support for virtual machines with input/output-intensive workloads.
Hot vs. cold: How you store your data in Azure depends on how often users access it. A multi-temperature data management solution will help you conserve costs. Hot data requires fast storage, while data that is rarely accessed (cold data) is stored on the slowest storage.

Compute

The cloud gives you instant access to computing resources. When planning, you should look into Azure Autoscale. The autoscaling feature dynamically scales applications to meet changing performance requirements.

Azure virtual machines will also give you more control over your computing environment. An Azure VM gives you the flexibility of virtualization without having to buy and maintain costly physical hardware.

Assess

Once you have a better understanding of Azure products and how they fit into your migration strategy, it’s time to evaluate your existing infrastructure. Here are some tools to help:

Microsoft’s Virtual Machine Readiness Assessment tool

This tool automatically inspects your on-premises environment, whether physical or virtualized, and provides a checklist for moving your workloads to the cloud. After the assessment, the tool generates a report detailing the workload attributes/configuration that are ready to move and what requires further investigation before moving. The report also provides additional resources to resolve issues and prepare the workload for a move to Azure.

Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) toolkit

The MAP Toolkit is an agentless inventory, assessment and reporting tool that securely assesses IT environments for various platform migrations including Windows Desktop OS, Office Products, Windows Server OS, SQL Server, Hyper-V, Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track and Azure. Since version 8.0, MAP Toolkit can assess environments and provide readiness information for both physical and virtualized workloads migrating to Azure.

Both of these tools can help you carefully review and document all applications, workloads and processes you currently use, including: