Migrating Line-of-Business Applications to Azure

In this comprehensive guide, we will walk through the process of assessing and migrating a multi-tier line-of-business application from an on-premises Hyper-V environment to Microsoft Azure. We will leverage a variety of Azure tools and services to ensure a successful migration, including Azure Migrate, Azure Database Migration Service, and Azure Site Recovery.

Abstract and Learning Objectives

Throughout this guide, you will learn how to:

  • Use Azure Migrate to assess the on-premises environment and create a migration plan
  • Migrate the application database from on-premises SQL Server to Azure SQL Database
  • Migrate the web and application tiers from on-premises Hyper-V VMs to Azure virtual machines
  • Reconfigure the application to use the migrated database
  • Perform post-migration steps to prepare the application for production

After completing this guide, you will understand the role of Azure Migrate and related migration tools, and how to use them to successfully migrate an on-premises multi-tier application to Azure.

Overview

The lab environment includes a pre-deployed on-premises infrastructure hosted in Hyper-V, running a multi-tier application called ‘SmartHotel’. The application comprises 4 VMs:

  • Database tier: Hosted on the smarthotelSQL1 VM, running Windows Server 2016 and SQL Server 2017.
  • Application tier: Hosted on the smarthotelweb2 VM, running Windows Server 2012 R2.
  • Web tier: Hosted on the smarthotelweb1 VM, running Windows Server 2012 R2.
  • Web proxy: Hosted on the UbuntuWAF VM, running Nginx on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

During the migration process, we will:

  1. Assess the on-premises environment using Azure Migrate.
  2. Migrate the application database from on-premises SQL Server to Azure SQL Database.
  3. Migrate the web and application tiers from on-premises Hyper-V VMs to Azure virtual machines.
  4. Reconfigure the application to use the migrated database.
  5. Perform post-migration steps to prepare the application for production.

Solution Architecture

The overall migration process is illustrated in the following diagram:

![SmartHotel Migration Overview][]

Throughout the guide, we will use Azure Migrate as the primary tool for assessment and migration. We will also leverage other tools, such as:

  • Azure Migrate: Server Assessment for assessing the on-premises environment
  • Microsoft Data Migration Assistant (DMA) for assessing the on-premises database
  • Azure Database Migration Service (DMS) for migrating the database schema and data
  • Azure Migrate: Server Migration for migrating the web and application tiers

Prerequisites

To complete this guide, you will need:

  1. Owner or Contributor permissions for an Azure subscription.
  2. Sufficient unused quota in your Azure subscription to deploy the VMs used in this guide.

Before You Begin

Before starting the hands-on exercises, refer to the Before the HOL - Line-of-business application migration setup guide to deploy the on-premises environment. This step should take approximately 60 minutes.

Hands-on Exercises

The guide is divided into the following exercises:

  1. Discover and Assess the On-premises Environment
  2. Migrate the Application Database
  3. Migrate the Application and Web Tiers

Each exercise includes several tasks that guide you through the migration process step-by-step.

After the Hands-on Lab

Finally, you will clean up the resources created during the lab to avoid ongoing charges.

Let’s get started with the first exercise!