Microsoft Azure: Migration

As part of the Microsoft Enterprise Skills Initiative I am looking into different topics in Azure and summarize my learnings. This post is about migration to Azure

There are some services which support you to migrate locally hosted services (virtual machines, databases, …) to Azure. Here the most prominent tools.

Azure Migrate

When you plan to migrate to Azure, there are a lot of things to consider. To help you, Microsoft offers with Azure Migrate a free service, that discovers, assesses, and migrates on-premises systems to Azure.

• performance-based sizing calculations (virtual machine sizing, compute/storage)
• assess Hyper-V and VMware-based virtual machines, as well as physical servers
• visualization of dependencies for those machines
• create groups of machines that can be assessed and migrated together

Azure Migrate requires an collector appliance (VMware or Hyper-V environment) which discovers and collect all information your environment. In addition to get the dependency visualization, you can install Microsoft Monitoring Agent and Dependency Agent on each VM. All this information goes into and Assessment. Based on this information one can the migrate or replicates up to 100 VMs simultaneously to Azure.

Azure Database Migration

Azure Database Migration Service is a payed service, which allows to migrate databases to Azure data platform, either offline (shutting down the source db) or online (continuous synchronization of live data) - latter is more costly. You need

• a Data Migration Assistant which has to be downloaded and installed on your on-premises servers
• an Azure Virtual Network instance
• an Virtual networks (VNets)
• an NSA with inbound connectivity on ports 443, 53, 9354, 445, and 12000)
• open port 1433/1434 on the DB server
• permissions CONTROL SERVER and CONTROL DATABASE on your SQL Server instance
• a target database in Azure

You then first migrate the Schema, and then the Data.