Microsoft Azure AZ-801 — Section 14: Migrate on-premises storage to on-premises servers or Azure

83. Transfer and Migrate data to Azure file shares

I want to get into the concepts now of getting information from the on-premises environment into the cloud. You might be doing this for backup purposes, but what I want to focus on is also making data available.

So, maybe, we have data that has been, maybe, shared out on-premises, but we’re wanting to make that data available in the cloud. All right.

Now, the first thing we’re going to need is. We’re going to need a storage account. The storage account is going to be the type of resource that’s going to store everything that’s going to go up in Azure. All right.

So, to do that, we can click the menu button here and I can click on storage accounts. For some reason, you don’t you don’t see that you can always go to all services and do a search for it. We’ll go to storage accounts and then we’re going to click to create a storage account. All right. And you do kind of have to keep in mind that storage accounts do cost money. They do cost Azure credit. They’re not real expensive until you start storing lots and lots of data. But you can go to the Azure calculator. If you do a quick Google search for Azure calculator, you can price out the cost of it. And then I’m going to store this storage account in my I have a resource group called US Resource Group R.G, and I’m just going to give this a name. I’m going to call this LP, these two US storage. A. C. T. A. C. T. Let’s make sure that name’s not already taken. Does it look like it is? It would tell me. And then from there, I’m going to go with standard because it’s cheaper. In general, all purpose account lets you kind of have a lot a few more features that I can. I can basically make any kind of storage account I want.

Now, with premium. But it does kind of force me to choose specific type of storage account. But I’m going to go with standard and this is the redundancy of it having redundancy. I’m not really getting into all this redundancy stuff right now. I’m just going to choose this one here, which is LIRs. All right. And then from there I can click Next. And I don’t have any of these settings I’m going to explain right now.

So, I am. I think that is it because I’m just just trying to create a storage account here. We’re not getting into the intricacies of creating storage accounts and we’re going to click to create. All right.

Now, I’m going to go ahead and pause this recording while that’s going on. Once the resource group is created, I’m going to click Go to Resources. All right. And. From there. You’ll notice all these various blades over here on the left. And I have these are the four main things that a storage account is going to be is going to manage. The two that we really care about here is containers and file shares. Containers allows us to do something called blob storage, a blob being a binary large object. Basically, a blob is just any type of file that’s possible. Any type of binary file, which is pretty much everything in computers these days. Right. Is going to be stored inside what is called a blob container, which is sort of like a folder in there. Now, blob containers are built specifically for dishing out web services very quickly, web images, images, videos, audio.

So, any type of web file containers is great for that. Containers will not support the be protocol server message. BLOCK So if you are wanting use storage accounts from refers to sharing folders and files and things and if you’re not using it for web purposes, for sharing web type files, then containers are not going to be a good solution. The one that we’re going to really care about in this lesson is file shares. This is Microsoft’s solution that sort of replaces on-premises file servers. It does support the SMB protocol server master block, which means people can map drives to file shares and all of that. Now, it can also dish out files to for the Internet as well.

So, website type files, images, video and all that, but it actually costs more money to use a file share than it does to use the blob container storage. All right. And then queues and Tables not really getting into that here. We’re going to click on file shares now. All right. And then I can create a file share.

Now, I’ll just call this file Shared docs. All right. Can’t have any uppercase characters. It’s very quick to tell you that if you do that and then you have a tear. Various tiers. And this sort of gets into.

Now, I didn’t choose to make a premium storage account earlier, so I don’t have the premium option. But transaction optimized is, I tell you, enable transaction heavy workloads that don’t need premium level latency. Great for applications, require file storage as a back end server or a backend store. Then you can do hot and cool storage. Hot storage is built for data that is going to be utilized a lot. There’s a lot of modifications that are occurring to it. Cool storage is when data is just going to be sitting there for long periods of time and it’s not going to be used to very often. All right. So, I’m going to go with hot and then I’m going to click to create. And I’ve now created myself a share. All right. So, this folder called Docs is shared.

Now, there are various ways that we can have information uploaded to a file share. The most basic way is just to click upload so like I could have if I go in a File Explorer here on my n1c Server1. Let’s say I’ve got a folder called Docs on my on-premises server here and I’ve got. Let’s say just a document says important data, and I can go in there and just type a bunch of information. Click Save.

So, the most basic thing I could simply do is just upload it, right? So just like that, I can go here and then I can go to. See drive here and then go into docks and there it is. And I can say upload. And very easily done. You can now see that I have connected that.

How does somebody connect to it? Well, there’s various ways that you can allow users to access this, but the most common that sort of everybody thinks about is how we’ve done it on-premises, you know, on-premises. What we would generally do is we would we could share out a folder, right? So I could go here to this on-premises folder, go to properties, go to sharing advanced sharing, share the folder, and we’ll just we’ll set domain admins to have full control. And then from there I could jump over to my other server, which is NYC-DC1. I could open up File Explorer and I could say \\NYC-SVR1, hit Enter and there it is. And then what I could do is I could map a network drive, right? So this is traditionally what a user would do. A user could map a drive and now there’s that important data and all that. But what about the cloud? Well, guess what? You can map drives in the cloud, but there’s a catch.

So, I can click Connect and from there it has a PowerShell script. And I could actually deploy this PowerShell script to my user’s computers. You could do that through GPOs if you wanted to.

There’s various ways you could at GPOs, you could use Intune Udacity, you could use scheme. There are lots of different ways that you could actually achieve getting this script to run against users computers. There’s a problem, though, and the problem if we copy this, let’s just. Let’s go into PowerShell real quick. The problem is back in the in the early days of the Internet as we all know it today, and you think about the early days that gets into like the, you know, the mid to late nineties and then even the early 2000s hackers. What happened was people would have they would basically have file servers and stuff in their companies and they would have SMB port four, four, five wide open to the world both inbound and outbound. And people didn’t know to close that port. So, a lot of your ISPs, what they did is they banded together and they said we are going to block port 445 outbound, not just inbound but outbound. So, most ISPs blocked port 445. So, normally you should just be able to run this script here, this command, and it would connect. But my ISP, like many ISPs, have blocked port 443, 445 going out, which is SMB.

How do you get around this? Well, in a business, normally your company would have a dedicated connection to Azure. They’re usually going to do a VPN, what’s called a VPN Gateway, which is a dedicated, secure connection to Azure, because really doing SMB over the Internet, even though SMB is encrypted, it’s not a good idea to do it straight across the Internet. But your company would usually have a VPN gateway of some sort. All right. Or they would have an ExpressRoute going. And I’m not really getting into the details on that. But if you if your company does have like a VPN router at their office, they could connect that directly to Azure and they’ll have a secure connection. All you got to do is look up how to build a VPN gateway in Azure. There’s lots of articles and stuff like that’ll show you how to do it, but basically you’d have a dedicated connection at your office that’s connected into the Internet or ExpressRoute, which is a telecommunication connection you can purchase. All right. So, that is how we could map a drive. We could actually map a drive to that share and away we go. All right.

So, there’s other ways another way that’s just one way. It’s very simple, very manual. There is the A-Z copy tool. If you had to upload a bunch of files. Right, So I can go to. I can do a search for the A-Z copy tool. And this is a very, very lightweight command line tool. That’s great for scripting purposes. If you wanted to, let’s say you wanted to upload a bunch of files and you wanted to write a very simple script that just went and grabbed a bunch of files and uploaded them to the cloud. Then a Z copy is a great way to do that. It’s going to it’s going to get that done for you relatively easily. It’s a very easy command to use. You can download the latest version of A-Z copy right here and install it on your computer.

So, that’s a way to basically run a Z copy on your server and you can upload lots of files. All right. Another way of getting files uploaded to the cloud. Is. Let’s go back over here. Back into my storage account directly here. And once we get into our storage account. You have. You have this thing, you have. First off, you can click storage browser and this will show you this is just kind of gives you a hierarchical view. It’s sort of a more like it’s sort of more like a Windows Explorer. If you’re used to Windows Explorer or File Explorer, this type of view, you’ll see it’s more like that.

So, see, I can go right here and I can double click on my file shares and it’s going to show me my file shares in hierarchical view.

So, that’s another way. And you can upload files that way. There’s another tool you can download called Storage Explorer, and you can actually install this on people’s machines. Like let’s say you have developers that are having to upload a bunch of files and you don’t want them to have to log on to Azure and all that they can get. Storage Explorer. Explorer, it’s Storage Explorer is a great little tool. This is not what I meant to click on. It’s trying to get me to start an Azure account. Let’s go back down. Oh, here it is right here.

So, stored Azure Storage Explorer for Cloud Management. And it’s got information where to download it, but you can download Stores Explorer and it’s a tool similar to File Explorer, it’s similar to File Explorer. And you can install that and let’s add a bunch of developers, and I don’t want the developers to have to go through the Azure Portal or whatever. We could use Storage Explorer to take care of that. All right. And basically the developers would be able to have access to Storage Explorer and they could upload files that way. And again, it’s more like a File Explorer. And then one more. One more way. Well, two more ways. I’m going to mention that you can get files into Azure. The next method would be to use the Mars agent.

Now, you remember me talking about Mavs? Probably I might have mentioned Mavs, the Microsoft Azure Backup Server. Mars is the Microsoft Azure Recovery Services and it can actually upload files straight to a storage account, not just the recovery services and all that, but you can actually have data back sent right into your storage account. And then the final method I’m just going to mention is it is called the Azure Drive Shipping Method, which is kind of interesting. With Azure Drive shipping, you can actually have hard drives, you can ship hard drives to Microsoft and they’ll import. I don’t know how that happened. They’ll import. The information directly into Azure. Another option is they will ship you hard drives that you can use for this. Here’s an image of one of their one of their hard drives right here that they’ll ship you. They have them in various sizes now. To do that, we set up what is called an import export job.

So, if I come over here to all services. I can do a search for what’s called an import export job. And the import export job is another way for me to pull information into Azure. All right.

So, just do a quick search here. Slowly but surely this virtual machine is just a bit slow because I don’t have a lot of memory on it. But here it is, import export jobs. I’ll click on that. And we can create an import export job. So, we’ll click to create. And you’ll see the different options. So, I could import an Azure or I could export out of Azure if I want. Choose a subscription. Choose your resource group. Um. Choose. Oops. Choose your source country. And then your destination, right? We’ll say east us and then I can hit Apply. All right. And then you can see the different options here. So, up to import export up to a terabyte worth of data. So, that’s another option.

Hopefully, that gives you an understanding now of the various ways we can get data. We can get data and share data out into the Azure storage account environment.

84. Cut over to a new server by using Storage Migration Service (SMS)

Let’s talk about the concepts now of the Storage migration service.

So, what is the storage Migration Service? Well, the goal here, you’ve got you’ve got to sort of think about the times they are changing, as the saying goes. And basically a lot of companies are now starting to consider taking their on-premises services and moving them to the cloud. And there’s a lot of reasons for this. One reason being that people are tired of having to deal with hardware. They’re tired of buying hardware and having to maintain hardware and all the headaches that come with it. But one of the major reasons and let’s face it, it’s money, right? It’s the general reason why a lot of people do a lot of things. And so ultimately, if a company can save a buck, they’re going to consider moving to that cheaper solution. And Microsoft and other cloud companies have made this a very lucrative offer that you could save a lot of money and also a lot of I.T. headaches as well. Of course, it people like it because of the fact that it can save a lot of it, headaches, having to deal with hardware and all that fun stuff. And all the upgrades and all that. But ultimately this is what the storage migration service is all about. It’s going to make it easier to migrate storage to the cloud. All right. And so the idea would be migrating storage from your Windows servers out to the Azure environment. You have a graphical tool that kind of inventories everything which works in conjunction with whack, right? The Windows Administrative Center. And it’s going to allow you to transfer data and to other servers or you can actually go to Azure.

So, that’s another thing. Not only is it mostly we’re kind of focused on moving to the cloud, and that’s the thing I kind of want you to have in your head is that this is mostly used for moving things out to the cloud, but you can migrate between servers as well. It’s not only for the cloud.

So, you could move, you could migrate on-premises servers to other on-premises servers, maybe, in a different location or something like that or newer server altogether. All right. Microsoft has had tools that have done something similar to this in the past. But this was this one is, of course, very cloud focused. All right.

So, this is going to allow you to also move the identity of the server to a destination as well so it can communicate with services like Active Directory and all that and say, okay, well, this server is the identity of the server has moved to another place. And of course this can work in conjunction with your DNS services and all that and you’re not having to go in and manually change any kind of links or paths or anything like that to make this work. All right.

So, why should you use the storage migration service? Well, the I think we’ve kind of clarified a little bit of that already, but the main reason would be to make your life easier, because you’ve got a server, maybe, you got a lot of servers that you need to be migrated to newer hardware, or you’re just trying to get everything out into the cloud.

So, again, the storage migration service is going to help inventory all the servers and data that’s there. And then you can rapidly get files and shares and all of that moved out to the cloud and it’s all going to happen securely as well, or not just to the cloud. But again, other servers, the cloud is sort of what we’re focused on here. But another thing is the identity of it all. As I mentioned a minute ago, you can do what’s known as a cut over where you’re moving that identity to another place and your clients don’t even know what’s happening. All right. And the other thing is you can manage multiple migrations at one time. This is one of the main benefits of utilizing the Windows AdminCenter  for managing this migration. All right.

So, how does it all come together? Well, if you look here, you can see kind of a visual here where you’ve got your different servers there that are on-premises. And you’ll notice some SMB shares listed there. The storage migration service in this case is running on a Windows Server 2019 box, and the Migration Service can communicate with things like the Azure File Sync as well as other physical servers. And from there you can have that information migrated through that, through those different servers out to your Azure environment, into the Azure file shares or other infrastructure as a service based systems, anything that basically can support server message blocks. All right. Which is the protocol that the Microsoft File servers all use for shares. And so obviously, SMB is going to play a pretty big role in making this happen. The Storage Migration service is acting as an orchestrator here to orchestrate the gathering and inventorying of all the information and then communicating with all the proper services in order to get that information exported out to whatever server or or cloud service that you want it to go to. All right.

So, hopefully now that gives you an understanding of how that all sort of comes together. Let’s look at the requirements to use the stir, the actual SMSs, the storage, Microsoft Migration service. They do warn you here in the requirements that a source server has got to be specified, and that’s going to be the server that this is going to go on.

Now, you can also support failover clustering. So, this is a failover clustering based service as well. It is compatible with failover clustering. The destination server needs to be running Windows 2019 or 2022 cluster or standalone. All right. They also tell you that Windows 2016 Server 2012 are to works as well, but are around 50% slower. And then they you have to have what’s known as orchestrator server running 2019 or to 2022 to manage the migration. All right. If you’re migrating only a few servers, maybe, one of the servers running 2019, 2022, you can use that as an orchestrator as well. And then lastly, a PC, your server that’s running the latest version of the Windows Admin Center, and that’s going to be used to start off this storage migration service interface. It’s going to let you sort of control everything. All right. And as far as the admin center goes, it must be at least version 2103 So those are just the requirements for setting this up. But ultimately it’s pretty easy to get to get moving in the right direction with the Windows Admin Center. It gives you a nice little web based interface for controlling it all. All right. Well, hopefully that now gives you a better understanding of what the storage migration service is and why you might want to use it.

85. Basics of using Storage Migration Service to migrate to Azure VMs

For using the storage migration services. You essentially will have to have Windows Admin Center installed, which I have installed on my NYC-SVR1, and if I open up my web browser I can go to the website for that which is NYC-SVR1 exam lab practice.com. I’ve installed all that earlier. And if I scroll down there is the storage migration servers right there. All right.

So, I click on that and first time you come in here, there’s a little button here. I think it says install. You got to click that and it just takes a couple like 30 seconds or so. And then at that point you come to the screen here. From there I can scroll down and I can click new job, give it a name, whatever. I was going to migrate file services or something, click Okay and then it’s going to pop up another set of options here. I’ve just got to scroll up. And this is going to start this whole process.

Remember, the goal here is the SMS service. Which is kind of funny to say SMS because it used to stand for system management services back in the 1990s with when Microsoft had a server called SMS but hadn’t been called that in a long time. The name got changed to skim and that’s a different thing. Although there are some similarities between SQM and this storage management. Migration services are storage. Migration services is going to let me migrate my servers and there is a pre-requisites check here. Basically, you just walk through this wizard, all right? This wizard is going to walk you through step by step on how to actually perform the migration. And I’m not going to run through this whole entire thing, but you can try this out if you want. If you want to perform a migration, you can go through this and have it checked the prerequisites and there’s some tools and stuff that’s got to be installed. And as you can see, it’s checking all that and then you can finish up the wizard and then from there you can start transferring your data and, and do a cut over.