Azure Migrate to simplifying your Migration Needs

In this digital and virtual era, migrating your legacy on-premise applications and services to the cloud is the core process in your migration journey and Csharptek is committed to helping the clients to simplify the process. Microsoft Azure recently came up with the latest innovation of Azure Migrate striving to make the cloud migration simpler for the clients. It gives a comprehensive portfolio of Microsoft along with partner tools to fulfill the migration requirements in one place. So let’s begin with first understanding what Azure Migrate is and then how it helps us in migration through this blog.

What is Azure Migrate?
Azure Migrate is a central hub that fulfills all your migration needs from data to applications to services. It helps the organizations in discovering, assessing, and automating the migration of legacy on-premise applications to the Azure cloud. It is basically a server migration tool that assesses the hosting costs of your applications and analyzes the expected performance of it in the Azure cloud. With the Azure Migrate, Server Assessment and Migration, Database Assessment and Migration have been made a lot easier for the clients. It provides several tools for the migration of VMs, data, databases, services, and web applications all in different ways.

Tools of Azure Migrate
Azure Migrate offers several tools for discovering, assessing, managing, and implementing migrations in an easy and agile manner.

1. Azure Migrate: Discovery and Assessment
Azure Discovery and Assessment tool enable discovering the servers running on any cloud or on-premise, along with VMs, databases, and bare metal servers. This tool can be used to find out the requirements for moving these workloads to Azure.

2. Azure Migrate: Server Migration
After the assessment is done by Azure Discovery and Assessment tool, Azure Server Migration is used to perform automatic migration of all the on-premise workloads to the Azure cloud. Sometimes you will face compatibility issues that can be resolved by fixing the existing server.

3. Data Migration Assistant
Data Migration Assitant is a stand-alone tool that helps you to plan a proper database migration strategy, identify new features for migration, prevent issues that may cause failure to the migration process, and provide alternatives for mitigating the unsupported features. It is a tool designed especially for assessing SQL servers.

4. Database Migration Service
This is a fully-managed migration service that helps in the automatic migration of on-premise SQL servers to the Azure cloud. In case of an issue, it also enables smooth rollback and minimizes the downtime of the server.

5. Movere
This is a software-as-a-service (Saas) platform that enables organizations to maintain visibility and control environments during migration by providing business intelligence for services, applications, and servers.

6. Web App Migration Assistant
This is a tool that helps in assessing the legacy on-premise .NET or PHP websites or web applications for migrating to the Azure cloud.

7. Azure Data Box
Azure Data Box has physical appliances that enable you to migrate a large amount of offline data to the Azure cloud. It consists of an 8 TB SSD disk, 100 TB storage device, and storage box for 1 PB of data.

Benefits of Azure Migrate

a. Azure Migrate helps you to migrate your legacy on-premise servers, databases, virtual machines, web applications, and data.

b. It is a one-stop destination for performing comprehensive discovery, assessment, and migration by Azure and its partnered tools.

c. As it is a centralized migration repository, it helps in delivering important insights about the workloads and performs end-to-end tracking.

d. Azure Migrate is simple, quick, and easy to use with cost optimization and efficient features.

e. High productivity, scalability, and availability are some of the byproducts of using Azure Migrate along with disaster recovery and advanced data security.

Migrating with Azure Migrate
For successfully migrating your workloads to the Azure cloud, the following steps can be followed –

I. Find your Goals
Before directly jumping into the migration, you need to first find out why you want to move your workloads to Azure and align your business goals with it. After this, identify the best match of a migration strategy fulfilling your goals. Also, you can use Migrate Discovery and Assessment tool for assessing your workloads and finding out the best practices for migrating them.

II. Identify your Digital Assets
After the goals are aligned, you need to know what all on-premise resources you need to migrate such as servers, applications, databases, and so on. The Migrate Discovery and Assessment tool can help you to identify your existing workloads to be migrated and the dependencies that need to be used. This tool discovers both physical and virtual servers and assesses the server configuration and application data. It also identifies the dependencies between cross-servers meaning provides strategies for servers dependent on other servers.

III. Assess Migration Requirements
For checking the readiness for migration, this phase involves the following steps:

• Checking server readiness – An assessment report is generated informing the Azure readiness for migration. If there needs to be some change, the report will inform about all the changes that need to be done before migration.

• Recommendations – After the server is passed the readiness check, the discovery and assessment tool offers recommendations for sizing based on your server settings or performance history. It also recommends disk type, VM SKU, pricing plan for your server.

• Visualizing data – Now you can view and analyze your migration plan and the assessment reports.

• Prioritizing Workloads – An inventory report identifying the workloads you need to prioritize or migrate first. This is done based on several factors such as complexity, business emergency, security, and many more.

IV. Start Migrating
After the requirements checklist is completed, you can first test run your workloads in Azure Migrate which will help you to understand the time it took and any potential problems. When the test run is successful you can run full-scale migration using Azure Migrate: Server Migration or Azure Data Migration Service (DMS) tools.

Conclusion
Azure Migrate has several features such as easy to migrate your heavy workloads, high flexibility, no data loss, traffic management, configuration management, high security, zero downtime, enhanced user experience, and improved performance. Csharptek has started using Azure Migrate tools while migrating our client’s workloads. So if you want to move to the cloud with a better and more efficient approach then simply with our front desk team at info@csharptek.com or call on 18008902630