Defining Your Cloud Migration Goals

Before embarking on your cloud migration journey, it’s crucial to understand and evaluate your motivations for moving to the cloud. The Cloud Adoption Framework outlines several common triggers and outcomes that can guide your strategic migration goals.

Some key business events that may drive your migration include datacenter exit, mergers and acquisitions, reducing capital expenses, addressing end-of-support for mission-critical technologies, responding to regulatory changes, or improving IT stability and scalability. Identifying your specific motivation will help you pinpoint the desired migration outcomes, such as cost savings, reduced vendor complexity, increased business agility, or the ability to scale to meet market and geographic demands.

Understanding Your Digital Estate

The first step in building your migration plan is to take inventory of your on-premises infrastructure, applications, and dependencies. This will help you identify the workloads you want to migrate to Azure and gather the necessary information to optimize your cloud costs.

Discovering Your Workloads

Azure Migrate’s lightweight appliance performs agentless discovery of your on-premises VMware VMs, Hyper-V VMs, other virtualized servers, and physical servers. The appliance collects server configuration details, performance metadata, and application data, which you can export to understand your application inventory and SQL Server instances.

In addition to the data discovered by Azure Migrate, you can leverage your Configuration Management Database (CMDB) to build a comprehensive view of your server and database estate, including how your workloads are distributed across business units, application owners, and geographies. This will help you prioritize the workloads for migration.

Analyzing Dependencies

After discovering your on-premises servers, you can use the dependency visualization feature in Azure Migrate to identify cross-server dependencies and plan your migration accordingly. By understanding which servers are actively used and which can be decommissioned, you can ensure a smooth migration process and avoid surprises during the transition.

Optimizing for the Cloud

Azure provides the flexibility to resize your cloud capacity over time, and the migration process is an opportunity to optimize the CPU and memory resources allocated to your servers. Azure Migrate’s assessment capabilities can help you understand your workload performance history, which is crucial for right-sizing your Azure VM SKUs and disk recommendations.

Assessing Migration Readiness

With a comprehensive view of your on-premises environment, you can start assessing the readiness of your workloads for migration to Azure.

Readiness and Suitability Analysis

The Azure Migrate assessment report will categorize your servers as “Ready for Azure,” “Conditionally Ready for Azure,” “Not Ready for Azure,” or “Readiness Unknown.” This information will help you prioritize your migration efforts and identify any remediation steps required before moving to the cloud.

For your SQL Server data estate, the Azure Migrate Database Assessment tool can provide insights into the readiness for migration to Azure SQL Database or Azure SQL Managed Instances, including potential migration blockers and recommendations for addressing them.

Sizing Recommendations and Cost Optimization

Azure Migrate’s performance-based sizing recommendations can help you right-size your Azure VMs and optimize your cloud costs. Additionally, you can explore other cost-saving options, such as Azure Reserved Instances, Azure Hybrid Benefit, Enterprise Agreements, and offers like Pay-As-You-Go Dev/Test.

Visualizing and Prioritizing Workloads

The Azure Migrate assessment reports provide a clear view of your Azure readiness and cost projections, which you can use to create custom visualizations and prioritize your migration efforts. Consider factors like complexity, business urgency, compliance requirements, and potential quick wins to develop a strategic migration plan.

Finalizing Your Migration Plan

Before finalizing your migration plan, ensure you address potential blockers related to network requirements, post-migration testing and tweaks, permissions, training, and implementation support.

Create a detailed migration plan that covers the apps you want to migrate, their availability, downtime constraints, and key milestones. Include a realistic buffer for post-migration testing and cutover activities to ensure a seamless transition to the cloud.

Executing the Migration

We recommend running a test migration in Azure Migrate to estimate the time required and identify any potential issues before the full-scale migration. When you’re ready, leverage the Migration and Modernization tool and the Azure Data Migration Service (DMS) for a seamless, end-to-end migration experience.

Azure Migrate also provides an option to seamlessly upgrade your Windows Server OS during the migration process, helping you modernize your environment while maintaining your settings, server roles, and data.

By following this comprehensive approach, you can build a well-planned, optimized, and efficient migration strategy to Azure, ensuring a successful cloud transformation for your organization.