Microsoft Azure AZ-801 — Section 15: Migrate on-premises servers to Azure

86. Overview of Azure Migration

As with many, many other past experiences with Microsoft, you’ll probably find that Microsoft gives us many different ways to perform actions and they come out with a solution. And then just a couple of years down the road, they come out with another solution for that same thing. And then a couple of years down the road, they come out with another one. And doing migrations is no different. All right. Probably one of the newer ways that Microsoft is released for us to migrate services into the cloud is a feature called the Azure Migration Appliance. And there’s an area in Azure called Azure Migrate. And Azure Migration Appliance is a resource you can create in Azure that’s going to help you with migration. And as you can see here and you can do, if you want to see this article for yourself, you can do a quick Google or being search about Azure migrate and they talk about it right here.

So, this is the goal here is to have a dashboard in Azure that’s going to sort of baby you through the process of migrating services into the Azure environment. All right. Microsoft wants to make this as easy as possible, right? It’s in their best interest to make our lives easier as admins in order to get software into the cloud. And they have the software, migration service and all that, which is a little bit of an older solution that works with Windows Admin Center. This is a newer solution that is a little easier to work with even. And so they tell you this is a unified migration platform hosted in the cloud. They provide all these tools that make it easier for you. They also allow you to do an assessment to basically assess your own environment if you’re migrating servers, databases, web applications. That’s really what this focus is on. And it’s going to help you with migrating any kind of virtual machine out to the cloud as well. They give all these different tools that are used for that assessment and monitoring modernization tools for things like migrating VMware, Hyper-V, virtual machines, even physical servers and their services databases and again, web applications. That’s another big one.

So, if you’re hosting Web a website or something or web application-premises and you want to get it into the cloud, they make that easy. And then they’ve also got the independent software vendor solutions, as you can see here, a whole range of those. And again mentioning the assessment tools and the things that you can migrate.

So, there’s just a lot here you can do. Microsoft even has a mover based software that is basically a software as a service that’s going to help you with moving this. And this was something that Microsoft purchased. It was an independent thing and it was purchased by Microsoft. The other thing is the migration is services are free. That’s nice, right? We’re not having to we’re not having to pay for any of this. Of course, you know, it makes sense that it would be free, right? Because the goal is to migrate stuff into the cloud. Right.

To show you about this, here I am on portal.com and I’m looking at the Azure migrate. How did I get there? All I did was click the menu button and go to all services and then just do a search for the word migrate and you’ll see Azure migrate. So, it’s very easy to get here and they have a getting started page and this is something that is constantly changing. So, don’t be surprised if, if you’re in this on your own side and it looks a little different than mine because Microsoft is, again, as you might have heard me say, I can change my videos and update my videos week after week after week. And it doesn’t matter. They’re always changing things constantly. And part of being a cloud admin is getting used to change. All right.

Anyway, you can see here, what are we wanting to do? Are we dealing with servers, databases and web apps? This would be the option here. If you’re doing databases only or other scenarios here, you can also just click directly on IT servers, databases and web apps. And what you’ll be doing is you’ll be creating a project which I’m not getting into in this video, but the project is basically going to be your appliance removing all this stuff. All right? And you’ll handle all the metadata and everything that’s involved in this migration process. All right. And then you’ve got database option here, creating a project for that. You have a VDI solution. If your company is using virtual desktop infrastructure and you’re using things like a bunch of Windows client operating systems hosted on a virtual server or hosted on like a Hyper-V host or a VMware host, you can migrate that. Then you got the Web apps solution. This again, is going to be used in a situation where you’re wanting to migrate Web services. If your company is hosting some kind of web application-premises, that’s what this is going to be for. And then finally, data box is migrating data. This is basically just an import export job. And you can go through the process of having hard drives that you ship to Microsoft where they import everything for you. You can also export information out of the cloud if you want to do that as well with this data box solution. All right. All right. So, hopefully that gives you an overview.

Now, if you’re going to implement Azure Migration Appliance, this is the starting point. This is the idea of it. And you’ll find that it’s definitely going to be an easier solution than using the server migration services that we have storage, migration services, SMS and all that.

So, this is supposed to be a newer solution that’s going to kind of start replacing that and it’s all going to be hosted in the cloud.

87. Configure an Azure Migration Project

All right. If we are going to start migrating something that is from our on-premises environment into Azure using the Azure migration services and appliance and all that, we have to start out by going to portal or.com, click the menu button, go to all services and then just do a search for the word migrate. That brings us into Azure Migrate. In this case, we’re going to go to server databases and web apps. And we got to create a project.

So, that’s the very first thing you got to do is create a project. Ask for a resource group. I’m just going to call this Migration for Migration Resource Group. All right, give it a name. I’m going to call it migration. Let’s just call it Migration project for lack of a better name. All right. And geography here. Go down here. United States for me. I’m not going to worry about advance. This is just asking connectivity if I’m going to support having an Internet connection in this, that’s fine. We’re going to click create and we will let our project get created.

Now, that our project is created, we have two main components here. We have the Azure Migrate Discovery and assessment, and we have the migration and modernization, which is the actual migration. Now, this is in this video. I just want to show you how to create the project, but I want to explain a couple quick things here before we move on. Originally, this tool, this Azure Migration Services, was just meant for assessment.

So, they came out with this years ago and it just allows you to run an assessment against your virtual machines or on-premises or whatever and verify that you could perform the migration. And if it was going to do like cost savings and performance increasing. And so this was a great solution for a company that’s considering moving into Azure and they are wanting to move some of their workloads from their on-premises environment, physical environment to the cloud or virtual machines into the cloud. And it would it would get into things like what’s the cost going to be on average for you if you move this VM and that way a company could say, well, you know, we’ve got all this hardware, it’s old, we’re going to have to buy new hardware. And they could sort of calculate the offset there of how much money they’re going to save. And so the assessment capability was the original plan for this. And then finally, and this is what we really care about, because we want to perform a migration, right, is the migration tools. And that’s done right here where you can tell it to go through and start discovering your on-premises machines and all that. And then you can do the replication, replicate your date up there, and then perform the migration, which is where you officially switch from the on-premises environment into the cloud. All right. And so this is the beginning of all this. We’ve now got our project set up for performing an Azure migration.