Azure Migration Checklist: Planning, Execution, and Optimization

As you prepare to migrate to Azure, it's essential to have a clear plan in place to ensure a smooth transition. This involves identifying and assessing your current infrastructure, applications, and data to determine the best approach for migration.

Start by gathering information about your current infrastructure, including hardware, software, and network configurations. This will help you identify potential challenges and opportunities for optimization.

A thorough assessment of your applications and data is also crucial, as it will enable you to determine which ones can be migrated to Azure and which may require additional preparation or re-architecture.

Your assessment should include identifying any dependencies, compatibility issues, and potential security risks.

Pre-Migration Planning is a crucial step in the Azure migration process. It's essential to finalize your migration plan by considering potential blockers, such as network requirements, testing and post-migration tweaks, permissions, training, and implementation support.

Evaluate network bandwidth and latency constraints to avoid unforeseen delays and disruptions to migration replication speed.

You should also allow a time buffer for performance and user acceptance testing for migrated apps, or to configure/tweak apps post-migration.

Review recommended Azure permissions, and server/database access roles and permissions needed for migration.

Prepare your organization for the digital transformation by providing solid training on Azure fundamentals, solution architectures, and security.

Consider getting support for your implementation if needed, and explore Azure certifications for your team.

Here's a checklist to help you with pre-migration planning:

By considering these factors and taking the necessary steps, you'll be well-prepared for a successful Azure migration.

Assessment and Readiness is a critical step in the Azure migration process. It helps you understand your on-premises infrastructure, applications, and dependencies, which is essential for identifying workloads to migrate to Azure.

To assess your readiness, you can use Azure Migrate, which provides a comprehensive view of your on-premises servers and dependencies. This includes server, disk, and NIC metadata, installed applications, roles, and features, as well as performance data.

Azure Migrate also allows you to export the application inventory list to find apps and SQL Server instances running on your servers. This helps you understand which workloads are ready for migration and which require remediation.

Here are the readiness categories you can filter on in the assessment report:

Understanding the process of assessment and readiness is crucial for a smooth transition to the cloud. Azure Migrate is a migration service that provides an easily applicable approach to cloud migration and modernisation.

You'll need to identify your on-premises infrastructure, applications, and dependencies to determine which workloads can be migrated to Azure. This will also help you gather optimized cost projections.

The Discovery and assessment tool is a great resource for identifying the workloads you have in use, dependencies between workloads, and workload optimization. This will give you a clear picture of what needs to be migrated and what can be left behind.

Using Azure allows organisations to plan an efficient and seamless transition to the cloud. It also enables the assessment of an organisation's on-premise workload and estimates the cost of hosting it in the Azure public cloud.

Businesses opting for the Azure cloud migration can harness its extensive framework, integrating various tools like Azure Active Directory (AD) and Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD). This will give you a head start on your cloud journey and make the transition much easier.

Azure Migrate can perform an automated assessment and prepare the next stages of migration for your on-premise servers and endpoints.

To understand Azure readiness, you can export the assessment report and filter on these categories: Ready for Azure, Conditionally ready for Azure, Not ready for Azure, and Readiness unknown. This helps you identify which servers can be migrated as-is, need minor changes, or require fixing before migration.

Azure Migrate's Discovery and assessment report can help identify potential migration blockers and recommendations for fixing them. This is crucial before migrating your apps and workloads.

The readiness/suitability analysis shows migration readiness status percentage for each SQL server instance, and identifies potential migration blockers, breaking changes, and compatibility issues.

To prioritize migrations, you can use strategic factors such as complexity, time-to-migrate, business urgency, production/non-production considerations, compliance, security requirements, and application knowledge.

Here are some ways to identify apps and workloads to prioritize for migration:

By using these categories and prioritization strategies, you can ensure a smooth and efficient migration process to Azure.

To save money on Azure compute costs, start by right-sizing your VMs using the Performance-based sizing option in Azure Migrate assessments. This helps you optimize workloads in Azure.

Reserved Instances can significantly reduce costs compared to pay-as-you-go pricing. You can bring on-premises Windows Server licenses with active Software Assurance, or Linux subscriptions, to Azure, and combine with reserved instances options.

Azure Hybrid Benefit can help you save even more money. Enterprise Agreement can offer savings for Azure subscriptions and services.

There are multiple Azure Offers to provide lower rates for dev/test VMs. For example, Pay-As-You-Go Dev/Test, or Enterprise Dev/Test offer.

Reviewing days per month and hours per day in which Azure VMs run can help you identify opportunities to shut off servers when they're not in use and reduce your costs.

You can create assessments in different regions to figure out whether migrating to a specific region might be more cost effective.

Here are some options to help save Azure costs:

When evaluating and prioritizing workloads for migration, it's essential to consider various strategic factors. These include complexity, time-to-migrate, business urgency, production/non-production considerations, compliance, security requirements, and application knowledge.

You can start by identifying low-hanging fruit, such as servers and databases that are fully ready for migration to Azure. The assessment report can help you filter these candidates.

To prioritize quick wins, use the assessment report to filter servers with state "Ready for Azure" and export the report. This can be the first group of servers to lift and shift to Azure using the Migration and modernization tool.

Servers running Windows Server 2008 R2/Windows Server 2008 are at the end of support and only Azure provides a free three years of security updates when you migrate them to Azure.

Another way to prioritize is by identifying end-of-support operating systems, such as Windows Server 2008 R2/Windows Server 2008, and exporting the assessment report to filter these servers.

You can also prioritize SQL Server migration by using the database assessment recommendations to migrate databases that are ready for Azure SQL Database using the Azure Migrate: Database Migration tool.

It's also crucial to analyze assessment reports to investigate storage constraints, such as disk IOPS and throughput, and the recommended disk type.

Here are some ways to prioritize migration order:

By prioritizing workloads based on these factors, you can ensure a smooth and efficient migration process to Azure.