Defining Your Cloud Migration Goals

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

Business Event Migration Outcome
Datacenter exit Cost reduction
Merger, acquisition, or divestiture Reduction in vendor/technical complexity
Reduction in capital expenses Optimization of internal operations
End of support for mission-critical technologies Increase in business agility
Response to regulatory compliance changes Preparation for new technical capabilities
New data sovereignty requirements Scaling to meet market demands
Reduction in disruptions and IT stability improvements Scaling to meet geographic demands

Identifying your key motivations will help you define clear, strategic migration goals. The next step is to plan a migration path tailored to your specific workloads, which the Azure Migrate: Discovery and Assessment tool can assist with.

Understanding Your Digital Estate

Start by identifying your on-premises infrastructure, applications, and dependencies. This will help you determine which workloads to prioritize for migration to Azure and gather optimized cost projections. The Discovery and Assessment tool can provide valuable insights:

Workloads in Use

The Azure Migrate appliance performs agentless discovery of on-premises VMware VMs, Hyper-V VMs, other virtualized servers, and physical servers. It collects server configuration information, performance metadata, and application data, which you can export to identify apps and SQL Server instances running on your servers.

Dependencies Between Workloads

After server discovery, you can analyze dependencies to visualize and identify cross-server dependencies. This helps ensure a smooth migration by understanding which servers are in use and which can be decommissioned. With your application inventory and dependency analysis complete, you can create high-confidence groups of servers and start assessing them.

Optimization and Sizing

Azure provides the flexibility to resize your cloud capacity over time, and migration is an opportunity to optimize the CPU and memory resources allocated to your servers. The Azure Migrate assessment can provide recommendations for right-sizing Azure VM SKUs and disk types based on your workload performance history.

Assessing Migration Readiness

Readiness/Suitability Analysis

Export the Azure Migrate assessment report to understand the readiness of your servers for migration. The report will categorize servers as “Ready for Azure,” “Conditionally ready for Azure,” “Not ready for Azure,” or “Readiness unknown.” You can also use the Azure Migrate: Database Assessment tool to assess the readiness of your SQL Server data estate for migration to Azure SQL Database or Azure SQL Managed Instances.

Sizing Recommendations

After a server is marked as ready for Azure, the Discovery and Assessment tool will provide sizing recommendations for the appropriate Azure VM SKU and disk type. This helps you optimize resources and costs as you migrate.

Get Compute Costs

Azure Migrate assessments use a performance-based sizing option to help you right-size VMs. Additionally, you can explore cost-saving options such as Reserved Instances, Azure Hybrid Benefit, Enterprise Agreements, and various Azure offers to further optimize your Azure spend.

Finalizing the Migration Plan

Before finalizing your migration plan, consider and mitigate potential blockers related to network requirements, post-migration testing and tweaks, permissions, training, and implementation support. Create a detailed cloud migration plan that includes information about the apps you want to migrate, app/database availability, downtime constraints, and migration milestones.

Migrating to Azure

We recommend running a test migration in Azure Migrate before starting a full-scale migration. This will help you estimate the time involved and identify any potential issues. When you’re ready, use the Migration and Modernization tool and the Azure Data Migration Service (DMS) for a seamless, integrated migration experience.

Additionally, Azure Migrate provides an option to seamlessly upgrade your Windows Server OS during the migration process, allowing you to move from an older to a newer operating system while preserving your settings, server roles, and data.

Next Steps

[Source: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/MicrosoftDocs/azure-docs/main/articles/migrate/concepts-migration-planning.md]