Migrating to Microsoft Azure

Introduction

During the current events with the COVID-19 pandemic, cloud migration is a necessity to quickly scale IT environments for an ever-growing remote workforce.

Many businesses have enquired about the cloud and how it can transform their digital business landscape. Many Businesses are starting to ask the question regarding how to successfully migrate to the cloud. For example, should I move my servers to the cloud just as they are? Are the servers and applications in the cloud optimized for cost efficiency? How am I going to move my data? What about Security?

The three major public cloud providers such as Amazon AWS, Google and Microsoft Azure are aware of both the growing demand and the questions that businesses may have about moving to the cloud. These providers are also aware that they must create competitive mechanisms and tools capable of speeding up the migration process, as well as address the questions that may delay or limit a company’s cloud first adoption. In this post, we’re going to explore at high level how you can successfully migrate from a VMware vCenter on-premises server to Microsoft Azure with an agentless solution.

Migration from VMware vCenter (on Premise) to Microsoft Azure (Public Cloud)

What is Lift and Shift?

Lift and shift is a migration strategy that chooses the path of least resistance by allowing you to “re-host” your existing workload without modifications to the application or redesigning how it is hosted.

Microsoft Azure provides several tools and services such as Azure Migrate or Azure Site Recovery (ASR) to perform agentless and agent-based migration from AWS Instances, VMware virtual machines (VMs), Hyper-V (VMs) and physical servers.

Azure Migrate is purpose-built for server virtual machine (VMs) migration. It provides a central hub to track discovery, assessment, and the migration of your on-premises workloads from both physical and virtual servers, and other private/public cloud VMs. The hub provides free in-house Azure Migrate tools for assessment and migration and other third party tools such as independent software vendor (ISV) tools.

Below, we’ll walk you through some mandatory steps during this phase of your cloud journey using Azure Migrate..

Discovery

The Azure Migrate Server Assessment tool allows you to discover all the target on-premises workloads to measure cloud readiness, identify risks and estimate costs and complexity before you migrate to the cloud. Once you create a new migration project from the Azure Migrate dashboard, follow these steps using the lightweight VMware VM appliance within Azure Migrate and you’ll complete the discovery phase in just a few minutes:

1. Download an Open Virtualization Appliance (OVA) template file and import it to vCenter Server

2. Configure the appliance and register it with the Azure project to start continuous discovery

3. After discovery, it takes around 15 minutes for metadata of discovered VMs to appear in the Azure portal

Assessment

After you complete the discovery phase, no other installation for your on-premise environment is required to run an assessment. From the Azure Migrate dashboard, you will be able to select the group of VMs you want to assess and then specify several properties to customize the assessment. There are two types of assessments you can run, decide whether you want to run an assessment using sizing criteria based on server configuration data/metadata that's collected as-is on-premises, or on dynamic performance data.

After the assessment is performed, you can view the results from the dashboard. You can also download a more detailed Excel file to show the results of the assessment. The screenshot below illustrates how the assessment assigns a readiness category for each VM and provides an estimate of what the monthly compute and storage costs will be after migration.

Once completed you will receive a confidence rating from Azure Migrate on the success of your migration. You’ll know how ready you are to move into the cloud BEFORE you actually execute the process.

Network Configuration

The migration appliance sends the collected data to Azure Migrate Server Assessment and Azure Migrate Server Migration over SSL port 443. Therefore it is important that a virtual network is setup in Azure before the migration of the on-Premise VMs and if required a Virtual Private Network (VPN). While the appliance can connect to Microsoft Azure via the public internet, we recommend that businesses lift and shift their workloads via a direct and secure Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute connection This provides a private, low-latency, high-bandwidth connection that is optimal for pushing large data sets to Microsoft Azure private backbone in a faster and more secure way than the public internet.

Azure Virtual Network (VNet) is the fundamental building block for your private network in Azure. VNet enables many types of Azure resources, such as Azure Virtual Machines (VM), to securely communicate with each other, the internet, and on-premises networks. VNet is similar to a traditional network that you'd operate in your own data center, but brings with it additional benefits of Azure's infrastructure such as scale, availability, and isolation.

Azure Virtual Private Network (VPN) Gateway connects your on-premises networks to Azure through Site-to-Site VPNs in a similar way that you set up and connect to a remote branch office. The connectivity is secure and uses the industry-standard protocols Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) and Internet Key Exchange (IKE).

Server Migration or Application Migration

After performing the assessment and configuring the network it’s time to start the migration tasks:

1. Prepare Azure Migrate: From the migration project in the Azure dashboard, add a new migration tool and choose the Azure Migrate Server Migration tool.

2. Prepare VMware vCenter: Download the OVA template, install the appliance in VMware vCenter and make the necessary changes on the VMs based on its operating System (OS) prior to the replication. The current infrastructure must be prepared to connect to Microsoft Azure VMs before migration.

3. Replicate VMs: This step configures the replication and starts replicating to Microsoft Azure storage all VMs selected.

4. Migrate the VMs: From the Azure Migrate project, shut down the virtual machines and perform a planned migration.