Best Tools to Migrate Your Workloads on Azure
66% of IT decision makers consider cloud migration challenging. This makes automation of cloud migration crucial to drive transformation and better outcomes. Microsoft Azure offers a lot of tools and resources to start, execute and migrate your workloads on cloud.
Microsoft migration tools and services
- Azure Migrate– A central hub for starting, executing, and tracking your Azure migration.
- Azure Database Migration Service– An end-to-end solution for migrating multiple sources to cloud database platforms at scale.
- Data Migration Assistant– A tool for assessing source SQL databases for potential compatibility issues on your target platform.
- Data Access Migration Toolkit – A VS Code extension for analysing Java and .Net source code and detecting data access API calls and queries.
Azure Migrate now delivers a unified, integrated experience across Azure and ISV tools, so you can pick the tool that best meets your needs.
Partners deliver value from migrating their customers to Azure:
- Unparalleled Innovation: Azure SQL Database, Azure IaaS, and Azure Migration / Azure Lighthouse
- Unmatched Security: Azure Security Center, Azure Sentinel, and Confidential Computing
- Unbeatable Offers/Programs: Free Extended Security Updates, Azure Migration Program, and ISV Certification Hub
In this post, we’ll provide an overview of Azure’s migration tools and how they can help you simplify and automate migration of on-premise workloads, as part of your Azure migration strategy. In addition, we will show how Embee can help you make your migration to Azure a cakewalk.
Migrating VMs at Scale with Azure Migrate
Azure Migrate is a Microsoft service that helps organizations assess the way their on-premises workloads will perform, and how much they will cost to host, in the Azure public cloud. It provides a single console to start, run, and track migrations.
Azure Migrate can check up to 35,000 VMware VMs and 10,000 Hyper-V VMs in each job, assess migration preparation, and provide actionable advice to help you save costs.
For VMware, it provides agent-based and agentless options, and for Hyper-V, it is agentless by default. It can also help you test your migration in an isolated Azure-like environment.
Azure Migrate can help you migrate the following types of workloads: –
- Servers—assess and migrate on-premises servers into Azure VMs.
- Databases—check and migrate on-premises databases to Azure SQL DB, or to Azure SQL Managed Instance.
- Web applications—assess and migrate on-premises web applications to Azure App Service.
- Virtual desktops—evaluate and migrate digital desktop infrastructure (VDI) to Azure Windows Virtual Desktop.
- Data—migrate data to Azure quickly and cost-effectively, using Azure Data Box products.
Azure Migrate provides the following integrated Azure migration tools:
- Azure Migrate: Server Assessment—discover and assess VMware VMs, Hyper-V VMs, and physical servers, to see if they are ready for migration.
- Azure Migrate: Server Migration—migrate VMware VMs, Hyper-V VMs, physical servers, and public cloud VMs to Azure.
- Web App Migration Assistant—asses on-premises websites and their infrastructure for migration to Azure App Service.
- Movere—a SaaS platform, acquired by Microsoft and integrated into Azure, which can accurately visualize entire IT environments. It is available through the Microsoft Solution Assessment and Cloud Economics Programs.
- Database Migration Service (DMS)— see more details below.
- Database Migration Assistant (DMA)—see more details below.
- Azure Data Box—see more details below.
Azure Database Migration Service (DMS) and Data Migration Assistant (DMA)
Azure Database Migration service is a tool that guides and automates your database migration to the Azure cloud. You can easily move large amounts of data, schema, and objects with DMS.
It supports the migration of Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB and Oracle to Azure from on-premises and other clouds. Azure Database Migration service offers self-healing migration with near zero downtimes and reliable results.
You can migrate following components with the helps of Data Migration Assistant: –
- Schema
- Users and data
- Agent Jobs
- SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS)
- Windows logins
Benefits of using Azure Database Migration Service (DMS) and Data Migration Assistant (DMA) tools for cloud migration: –
- Migrate your database and server objects with near-zero downtime.
- It supports all the common database management systems and key migration scenarios.
- Automate your database migration to Azure with PowerShell.
- Simplify your migration with a two-step process: –
- Firstly, use Azure Migrate to discover on-premises data estate, assess migration readiness, and choose the right architecture.
- Secondly, Database Migration Service to move your on-premises databases to Azure.
DMA helps you discover compatibility issues that can affect database functionality on newer versions of SQL Server or Azure SQL Database, after your migration. It recommends changes required to your origin database to facilitate migration, and functionality and reliability improvements to your target environment.
Once you remediate the issues found by the assistant, Azure Database Migration Service performs all the essential steps, migrating data automatically according to Microsoft best practices.
The assessment workflow helps you detect the following issues that could affect Azure SQL database migration and offers detailed guidance on resolution: –
- Migration blockers—Compatibility issues that prevent you from migrating on-premises SQL Server databases to Azure, with recommendations to remove the blockers.
- Partially supported characteristics—Partly supported or unsupported features which are presently in use on the origin SQL Server, with recommendations, alternative strategies offered in Azure, and mitigating steps.
After a successful migration, applications can seamlessly connect to the target SQL Server databases in Azure like they did before the migration.
Azure Data Box: Move Over Terabytes to petabytes of data to the cloud
Move all your data to Azure with data box when you are limited by time, network costs, availability, or other inefficient copy tools. All the data is AES-encrypted and devices are cleaned after upload in accordance with NIST Special Publication 800-88 revision 1 standards.
Data box offers following advantages for data migration: –
- Transferring terabytes to petabytes of data with limited network connectivity.
- Data is transferred in one go.
- Your offline data gets stored in secure and accessible in Azure’s online media library.
- To transfer historic data to Azure for analysis and reporting with HDInsight.
- The data is moved first in bulk followed by incremental transfers over a network.
- You can also set up periodic uploads in cases where large amount of data is created on a regular basis.
Migrating Data to Azure with Embee
Embee’s Cloud experts simplifies all your operations in the cloud. We make sure that data center migrations take place in a smooth, effective, and streamlined manner without any negative business impact. Drive value and focus on business growth with full control of your data, applications, and workloads by deploying hyper-scalable and secure architecture on the cloud.
Assess & Plan
Assess, plan, and align actionable cloud adoption processes to business goals & expected outcomes.
- Project Scope Definition
- Identifying scope of work and deliverables definition
- Assessment Scoping
- Study the source code, current architecture, Database diagram
- Define Migration strategy- Rehost / Refactor / Re-Architect / Rebuild
- Define DevOps
- Cloud Adoption Plan
Design & Organize – Making you cloud-ready
Prepare, design, and setup the cloud environment for the planned changes.
- Migration roadmap
- Role based Access management
- Naming convention for all resources
- Manage costs & billing center
- Setting up Azure for your workloads
- Landing Zone creation
- Cloud security and governance
- Update Cloud adoption plan
- Dev/QA/ testing
Launching to the Cloud
Migration that’s quick & error-free, so that customer can focus on their vision, without worrying about the infrastructure.
- Migration and modernization of workloads in waves and sprints
- Release for UAT
- Optimize & Promote
- Configure Cost Management
- Production Release
- Documentation
- Validation and performance testing
- Knowledge transfer and training
Innovate your cloud environment
Building new capabilities to unlock new technical skills and expand business capabilities.
- Establish business value consensus
- Creating a Minimum Viable Product
- Validation across users & stakeholders
- Roll-out with our comprehensive cloud adoption framework
Achieve greater flexibility, security, storage and consistency to meet the needs of your business today and tomorrow with No-Cost Data Center Migration services by Embee.