Migrating to Microsoft Azure: Moving Apps, Workloads,

Discover Migrate Optimize

Migrating to Microsoft Azure: Moving Apps, Workloads, and Virtual Machines

A Use Case

Overview

Moving apps, workloads, or even individual virtual machines to the cloud can be a stressful experience. How do you ensure the environment stays active while you are migrating and avoid disruption? Thinking about the preparation required for migration can be overwhelming and stall movement in the right direction. And if you plan migration for afterhours, you increase cost and complexity--and stress, since everything has to work perfectly before the start of business the next day. Why not use tools that you can use anytime, with no impact to your business?

The benefits are clear: Microsoft Azure, for example, enables you to take advantage of global scale infrastructure to deploy your own applications, with capabilities to reduce maintenance requirements and costs, and maximize performance. And as long as you take the time to consider requirements and explore available Microsoft migration capabilities, moving to Azure can be a quick and relatively easy process. This document explores a typical migration process through the perspective of Contoso, a fictitious company. Migration is the second stage of the three-stage migration process recommended by Microsoft and its partners. 1. Discover. Use available tools to get better visibility on computing systems

in your environment and assess the optimal resource level to run them in Microsoft Azure. Use this information to help decide which workloads to move. 2. Migrate. Move selected workloads to Azure from a variety of sources including physical servers, and virtualized workloads hosted on Microsoft Hyper-V or VMware environments. 3. Optimize. Fine tune your Azure-based workloads and maximize your ROI.

USE CASE Migrating to Microsoft Azure: Moving Apps, Workloads, and Virtual Machines

Migration prerequisites

Organizations preparing for migration to Azure will find the process includes prerequisites for both on-premises and Azure components.

? Azure prerequisites: Make sure you have a Microsoft Azure account, Azure networks, and storage accounts.

? On-premises components:

Site Recovery components: You need either a physical machine or a virtual machine running on-premises Site Recovery components which are comprised of a Process Server and a Management Server. Both of these applications can run on the same server.

VMware prerequisites: Set up user accounts so that Site Recovery can access VMware servers and virtual machines.

Virtual machines to move: All virtual machines to replicate must comply with Azure requirements. Each virtual machine also needs a Mobility Service component installed. Installing the Mobility Service can be done individually or through software distribution to the servers, which makes it easier for large numbers of servers.

Once an organization completes the discovery stage using available tools to understand options and inform decisions, it can move to the migrate stage. In the discovery stage, covered in a separate document, Contoso discovered and assessed its VMware environment, and mapped its on-premises virtual machines to Azure virtual machine instance sizes, types and storage, plus obtained Azure cost estimates. The next step, covered in this document, was to migrate the virtual machines to Azure using Azure Site Recovery.

Azure Site Recovery is a service available through the Azure portal used primarily for backup and disaster recovery. It's one of the easiest methods to migrate virtual machines to Azure--including from on-premises bare metal, Hyper-V, and VMware systems, from AWS, and also between Azure Regions, which are areas containing one or more datacenter.

Use case: Contoso

Earlier, Contoso completed the discovery of its VMware environment to determine which virtual machines Contoso wanted to move to Azure first. Reducing cost was of interest to the team, but key drivers for migration were the need for hardware resource scalability, plus improved management and security using integrated tools and analytics.

Because Contoso wanted to minimize potential issues from migrating workloads with complex dependencies on multiple systems, the team decided to take a conservative approach to gain expertise on the overall migration process and develop best practices for their environment.

Earlier, the team had determined that its first virtual machines to migrate would be those with no dependencies that were also underutilized and consistently wasting resources. Contoso had collected enough data during the discovery phase to select the migration candidates. The team also found Azure virtual machine type and sizing information for the workloads they wanted to move, plus the approximate Azure costs.

The Contoso migration team then took some time to learn about the overall prerequisites, limitations, and replication architecture and components to plan the migration appropriately. The overall migration process is relatively simple and easy, but requires planning and awareness of the components and process. ASR also includes direct-to-Azure migration features including a 31-day free trial to support the move without licensing cost.

On-Premises Virtual Machines

Azure Site Recovery

Azure

Mobility Service

Process Server and Configuration Server

Virtual Machines Storage Networking SQL Services Management Services

Azure Site Recovery prerequisites include both on-premises and Azure components. 2

USE CASE Migrating to Microsoft Azure: Moving Apps, Workloads, and Virtual Machines

Contoso had already matched virtual machine sizes as part of the discovery effort, and next needed to focus on networking. Because migrating large virtual machines takes time, Contoso calculated bandwidth to be used for each migration to avoid overconsumption on its production network. Additionally, Contoso expects to operate in a hybrid cloud environment, so the team decided to use Azure ExpressRoute and contracted with a Microsoft partner to acquire the high-speed and low latency network connectivity that Azure Express Route provides.

As part of its research, the team learned it could reduce its Azure Virtual Machine costs with the Azure Hybrid Benefit for Windows Server, available to organizations that have Software Assurance on their Windows Server licenses. The benefit enables organizations like Contoso to use their on-premises Standard or Datacenter edition licenses to run Azure Virtual Machines at base compute pricing. Contoso was able to use the benefit to reduce its costs below any competing cloud platform while providing some workloads with more computing power in Azure than they had on-premises.

Data migration

The workloads Contoso migrated as part of its Phase 1 effort could be organized into three groups.

? Workloads with no dependencies to other systems nor relational databases.

? Workloads with databases built into the application solution and easily moved while inside the migrated virtual machine.

? Workloads with databases that were in separate on-premises virtual machines.

The third group required some additional effort. One database in a virtual machine moved easily to Azure using traditional database export and import and the team easily established a connection with the Web server application. A second database--a specialized marketing and sales database--had been growing rapidly and executive management planned to expand the database in the future. This put them at a decision point.

Yes, they could "lift and shift," but that meant they would still have to manage a quickly growing database--without a good way to calculate future costs, including people required to maintain the database. They needed unfettered scalability plus the ability to incorporate the database into a global data application modernization project. The team decided to migrate the database to Azure SQL Database--instead of migrating directly to a virtual machine running SQL Server--to enable massive scale and global availability as needed.

The key was getting the data out of the on-premises database and into Azure SQL Database. Contoso signed up for the preview of Azure Database Migration Service and configured the source and targets, then provided authentication for both on-premises and Azure. This enabled them to migrate their on-premises database into Azure with minimal complexity and cost. Once the database was migrated, Contoso pointed the calls in the Web server to the new source.

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USE CASE Migrating to Microsoft Azure: Moving Apps, Workloads, and Virtual Machines

Results

Contoso found that migrating on-premises VMware virtual machines to Azure was easier than originally anticipated. Microsoft and its partners had provided a range of products and services to support the migration and accelerate digital transformation: ? Simplified migration process using Azure Site Recovery, an infrastructure that Contoso

used on a free trial basis for 31 days. ? Seamless migration of data sources into Azure SQL Database using Azure Database

Migration Service. ? High-speed networking into Azure for transferring large virtual machine files and

database data by adding ExpressRoute. ? Reduced costs of ongoing operations using Azure Hybrid Benefit for Windows Server

and License Mobility in Azure.

Find out what Contoso did next after migrating workloads to Azure. Read the third use case in this series on the migration process. Find it at .

? 2017 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This document is provided "as-is." Information and views expressed in this document, including URL and other Internet Web site references, may change without notice. You bear the risk of using it. Some examples are for illustration only and are fictitious. No real association is intended or inferred. This document does not provide you with any legal rights to any intellectual property in any Microsoft product. You may copy and use this document for your internal reference purposes. September 2017

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