Azure Migrate is a product that was released in 2018 Microsoft, but this July it received a revamp with a whole host of new features! I work at Microsoft helping customers through their journey from on-premises IT environments to ones in Azure, so I am super excited to see the new features land and be available to the general public.  

So, what are the new features?  

Integrated Experience

Azure Migrate can now be classed as the hub for your migration needs, now within the tool you have capabilities to assess Hyper-V and VMware environments, and the ability to migrate Hyper-V, VMware, physical and workloads sitting on other clouds into Azure, free of charge. And if Microsoft’s own tooling doesn’t suit your needs, we now have third party tooling integrated that you can use instead!   

You also have access to the Data Migration Assistant tooling and the Data Box order system to assist with database migrations or moving large volumes of data into Azure.  Plus, you can now have a look at migrating your.NET and PHP web apps to the Azure Platform-As-A-Service with our assessment and migration tooling. 

All your needs should now be met within the Azure Migrate hub, from assessment to migration. 

Migration Experience

As well as the additional assessment tooling that version 2 has brought to us, we now have migration capabilities within Azure Migrate! No longer do you need to turn to Azure Site Recovery (ASR) or a third party to migrate your workloads, you can utilise the Azure Migrate Server Migration tool either with an agent or without.  This supports migration of servers from Hyper-V, VMware and physical.  

ASR is a great tool but it was designed as a disaster recovery tool, and it’s great to see a dedicated migration tool now available from Microsoft.   

And the great thing about Azure Migrate is the assessment and migration features are free, there are no charges involved with product itself. Charges are involved when you start to replicate data and start to use those workloads within Azure, but Azure Migrate itself is a free product.  

Summary

It’s exciting see Azure Migrate mature as a product within Microsoft’s offerings.  You can really see that the product group are listening to feedback from customers and partners to bring a complete product.  

Check out our official documentation here to find out more about the product and how to implement it within your environment. 

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Moving to the cloud can help move your business into the future. It means you can take advantage of new technology such as Artificial Intelligence (AI). It’s easy to as scale your business grows and it also makes adapting to changing market environments easier. By not relying on on-premises infrastructure, your organisation also becomes more resilient while reducing spend on IT. I regularly have conversations with customers about migrating from their on-premises environments and it can often depend on two major factors; how and how much.

Often the key time to consider migration to the cloud is when you’re on the verge of an expansion or upgrade. For instance, when your server hardware is at the end of its life cycle or you need to grow your data centre.

The first step to planning how to migrate to the cloud is understanding what your current environment looks like, what are your servers, how are they interconnected, and how are they currently running and key questions. Without this kind of information organisations can struggle to plan and deliver a successful migration.

Cost benefits of moving to the cloud

A data-centre migration has an obvious initial cost, both in terms of money and effort. Moving to the cloud can save money in the long term. On-premises data centres can be expensive to maintain, incurring costs via upgrades, maintenance, and staff time and energy. A data centre has an average lifespan of about 10–15 years.

The cloud doesn’t have these limitations. It scales to your output, so you use only the servers you need, when you need them. It also eliminates on-premises costs, such as power and cooling, while freeing your employees to focus on business value. Moreover, things like hardware upgrades are taken care of by the cloud provider and gives you access to cloud-only technology such as artificial intelligence (AI).

To conduct an assessment of your environment there are several methods that can be used, these vary from making use of spreadsheet software to dedicated tooling. In this article I will take you through the methods I have used with customers:

• A simple spreadsheet calculation
• Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit
• Azure Migrate
• Third Party Tool (Movere, Turbonomics, Cloudamize, Corent, etc)

Spreadsheet calculation

If you want a general idea of the cost of migration, a spreadsheet calculation is a good way to do it. For example, if you have a VMware environment, you can easily export the configuration information from there into an Excel spreadsheet and use that data to gain a pricing insight for them.

There are two projects that have been created by Microsoft employees that will take that spreadsheet data and output a ‘like for like’ hosting pricing for you:

• VMChooser
• Azprice

Using this method is also a great way of starting the conversation with your leadership team without much effort or investment.

However, using this kind of pricing gives you only a general idea as it provides a like-for-like view of what running the estate in Azure would cost. It doesn’t take into consideration any performance-based optimisation that a purpose-built assessment tool can provide. It’s also worth noting this pricing exercise only prices up the servers—it doesn’t include pricing for networking costs, monitoring, backup, or any extras.

When to use: If you need to quickly show the value of moving your environment to Azure.

Assessment tools

Using an assessment tool is a good way to get a complete overview of the costs of data-centre migration. Here’s a few tools I’ve had experience with:

Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit

The Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit is a free inventory, assessment, and reporting tool. It collects environmental data and inventories, computer hardware, software, and operating systems without installing any agent software on the target computers.

The MAP toolkit gathers information about any type of server—virtual or physical—within your environment and gives you some actionable information about your environment’s Azure readiness, sizing, and cost.

It provides a suggested virtual machine size if the server was to be hosted within Azure, but it doesn’t provide the cost of that virtual machine, so that step would need to be carried out manually—maybe using one of the calculators mentioned above.

When to use: If you can’t access the virtualisation layer to deploy a migration tool—that is, if your virtual servers are hosted on a managed shared VMware environment by a third-party provider.

Azure Migrate

Azure Migrate is used to assess VMware and Hyper-V (currently in private preview) environments but cannot assess physical servers. It is appliance based, so there is no requirement to pre-set or pre-configure servers.

Meaning you can get up and running quickly by simply downloading an .ova or .vhd file and importing it into your environment. It has two levels of discovery, which I refer to aslight and deep.

Light discovery

The light discovery method helps to discover:

• Cores
• Memory
• Disks
• Disk sizes
• Network adaptors
• CPU usage
• Memory usage
• Disk IOPS
• Disk throughput (MBps)
• Network output (MBps)
• VM name
• IP address

This part of the discovery is done agentless. The Azure Migrate appliance simply plugs into the VMware or Hyper-V virtualisation technology and gathers the information it needs.

From this, you get a report that gives information about the servers’ suitability to be hosted within Azure, VM size (either based on like-for-like configuration or performance-based configuration), and the monthly cost of having to run the server within Azure. Use of Azure Migrate in the light discovery mode is free.

Deep discovery

For deep discovery, two agents need to be installed on each server: Microsoft Dependency Agent and Microsoft Monitoring Agent.

When you install the agents, they can pull out detailed information about the servers and how they communicate with other services both within and outside the environment.

This deep discovery phase can help you understand which servers rely on each other and need to be moved together or how you could potentially look at modernising them into a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering. It is also great at helping to fill the gaps that might be missing due to lack of documentation, staff attrition, or other factors. This makes the migration a lot simpler and reduces the risk of moving large numbers of servers.

Deep discovery uses the Service Map technology within Log Analytics. Note: there are associated costs with using Log Analytics.

When to use: If you are looking to price up and understand what the migration path would be within your environment and start planning your migration path.

Third-Party Tool

There are also a variety of third-party tools that are available to help assess your environment. Each of the tools have their own advantages and disadvantages. Some require a licence per server that is being assessed, others incur a one-off cost.

When to use: If you have a specific use case that Microsoft’s own tools can’t fully evaluate.

Start your digital transformation with migration

Kick start your digital transformation journey by using a tool to help assess your environment and understand what your migration would look like.  Moving to the cloud not only saves money in the long run, but you’ll also benefit from a strengthened security posture. The cloud offers multi-layered, built-in security controls and unique threat intelligence to help identify and protect against rapidly evolving threats. Plus, you’ll benefit from becoming more innovative from access to fully managed services and cloud-only technology.

[msce_cta layout=”image_center” align=”center” linktype=”blue” imageurl=”http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-gb/industry/blog/wp-content/uploads/sites/22/2018/12/traditiona-cloud-1024.png” linkurl=”https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/” linkscreenreadertext=”Go further with the cloud” linktext=”Go further with the cloud” imageid=”4357″ ][/msce_cta]

About the author

Sarah has worked in IT for over 13 years. She’s been a subject matter expert in various solutions through my career including Microsoft Exchange, System Centre Configuration Manager and Patch Management, to name a few. As a STEM Ambassador, she enjoys sharing her story with the next generation to inspire them into a STEM career. She is the founder of the Glasgow Azure User Group.

The post How to build an effective data migration project for a successful journey appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

When considering a migration from your on-prem data centre to Azure, there are several stages you should consider.

The first stage, assessment, is key to the success of your migration. You need to have a good understanding of what you have within your environment and how it all interconnects.

There are various tools available that can help you do the discovery piece of your migration journey; Microsoft’s offering is called Azure Migrate.

Azure Migrate assesses your on-premises machines, providing performance-based sizing information, cost estimates and suitability information for running within Azure.

Do note that Azure Migrate is a pure discovery tool. In order to migrate your machines to Azure you should look at using services such as Azure Site Recovery  and Azure Database Migration Service.

At the moment, Azure Migrate only supports assessing VMware environments. However, functionality to be able to assess Hyper-V environments is currently in a private preview state.

Tell me more…

By using a collector appliance within your environment, it discovers information about your on-premises VMs.  The collector appliance is a lightweight virtual machine (VM) that doesn’t require any agents installed on your servers. It connects to your VMware vCenter Server (via a read-only account) and collects VM metadata using the VMware PowerCLI cmdlets.  The collector appliance communicates on port 443 with Azure and with your vCentre server, so minimal firewall changes will be required.

The metadata that is collected from your environment includes:

• Cores
• Memory
• Disks
• Disk sizes
• Network adapters
• CPU and memory usage
• Disk IOPS
• Disk throughput (MBps)
• Network output (MBps)

This metadata is pushed to an Azure Migrate project, which can be in one of the following geographies:

It’s key to remember that regardless of where the metadata is stored you can migrate your on-premises VMs to any of the Azure locations.

Once the information has been pushed to the Azure Migrate project you can create an assessment, which will flag any issues you may have trying to run certain Operating Systems (OS) on Azure, provide recommendations for the VM size to use in Azure, and the costs associated with running these VMs each month.

You can create multiple assessment reports to suit your needs regarding VM sizes, location, VM uptime, Reserved Instance pricing and even Azure Hybrid Benefit pricing.  This gives you the ability to model different scenarios that can be presented to your senior leadership team when trying to decide the best way forward for your environment.

Dependency Visualisation

In addition to the assessment data collected by the collector appliance, you can also implement dependency visualisation which helps you to view and identify related machines that need to be migrated together to Azure.

Azure Migrate leverages the Service Map solution that is part of the Azure Log Analytics service, to provide the dependency visualisation.

You can either associate an existing Log Analytics workspace or create a new one, but please be aware once you attach a workspace to your project, you cannot change it.

To take advantage of the Dependency Visualisation you need to download and install two agents onto each on-premises VM you want to analyse.  These agents are:

• The Microsoft Monitoring Agent (MMA) – this is the same agent that System Centre Operation Manager (SCOM) uses
• The Dependency Agent

Each VM that you install the agents on needs to be able to push the data back to Azure via the Internet. If any of your VMs don’t have Internet access you will need to leverage the Log Analytics gateway.

Below is a picture of what the dependency visualization output will look like:

By carrying out the dependency visualisation assessment you will be able to identify which of your on-premises VMs are interconnected and have dependencies on each other.  This is useful for planning your migration as you want to migrate machines that have dependencies on each other together, to avoid any latency, connectivity or performance issues.

Cost

Azure Migrate is available at no additional charge, and the dependency visualisation feature is free for the first 180 days when used in conjunction with an Azure Migrate project.  You may incur charges if you use other solutions within Log Analytics, or run the service for more than 180 days.

Further Reading

• If you are looking for more information regarding a migration to Azure, please head over to the dedicated Azure Migration Center.
• The Azure Migrate documentation can be found at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/migrate/.
• If you’d like to suggest features for Azure Migrate in the future, please check out the user voice forum.

The post How to prepare for a move to Azure with Azure Migrate appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Within my role as a Cloud Solution Architect I am often working with customers to help price up solutions within Azure, and I often turn to the Azure Pricing Calculator.  However, there are scenarios where that tool isn’t entirely appropriate for use.

I recently found two tools that can be used as alternative price calculators within the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) space.  Both tools are available to the community and have been built by Microsoft employees in their spare time.

Azure Price Calculator

The first tool is the Azure Price Calculator, which was built by Kirill Danilov and Alexey Raspopov.  The tool was designed for several reasons, which include reducing the time taken to calculate the price of a whole environment, and to understand better how Azure Reserved Instances affect overall cost.

One way of using the tool is to build a CSV file with details about your virtual machine (VM) name, CPU, RAM and Operating System type, then upload it to the site. You then select the region you wish to host these machines in and hit calculate.  The tool goes through the inputted date, selects the relevant VM size, gives you a Pay As You Go cost for that VM and shows you what happens to the cost if you apply reserved instances. The information can then be downloaded or emailed to you for further analysis.

If you aren’t keen on uploading that information, you can manually input your VM details and get the information as well.

The tool is available at https://azprice.info/.

Azure VMchooser

The Azure VMchooser is a tool that Karim Vaes has built.  It all started with the VMchooser, which helps you to find the best Azure VM-size match.  It has since grown from there.

The other functionality this website gives you is:

• DiskChooser: This helps you understand the most cost-efficient disk layout you can have.
• BulkUploader: This combines the VMchooser and DiskChooser functionality in one place, and again allows you to upload a CSV with your information, and outputs the results.
• VMoptimizer: This helps you understand what the price of your VMs will be for VMs that won’t be running all month, then presents back information about costs depending on the Operating System you would be using, including the cost of Reserved Instances.
• SQLChooser: Has been designed to help you understand the cost implications if you want to host SQL in Azure, whether that be SQL on an IaaS service, or an elastic or managed service Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution.

The Azure VMchooser is an open source tool, with the source code stored in Azure.

The tool is available at https://www.vmchooser.com/.

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I love that my fellow Microsoft and IT colleagues have seen some challenges with the official pricing calculator and have invested time and energy into developing solutions to resolve them.  My call to action to you would be to check out these two tools and also get in touch with information about community built tools you use and love.

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