And as I mentioned,
one of the two services we're concerned with here is Storage Migration Service.
What is Storage Migration Service?
Well,
its main value proposition is it's a Windows Server technology
that helps you rapidly migrate individual files,
but principally file shares and their associated
configurations from a source server,
either to say a newer server that's running a more
recent version of Windows Server.
But there's also a path where storage migration ties in with Azure
Migrate to migrate your file server entirely to Azure.
Now we're going to get into the server migration big time in the next module.
In this one,
we're looking at a lighter weight scenario where you have an on‑premises
file server that say is running Windows Server 2019,
and now you have a Windows Server 2022 box that you want to
take over those shares without interrupting your existing
drive mappings and other dependencies,
you don't want to interrupt your user experience,
all right?
Now the Storage Migration Service supports Windows,
whether or not those machines are in failover clusters,
as well as Linux, which, again,
that never ceases to amaze me that Microsoft supports Linux
and even has its own Linux distribution.
It's a great time to be a Microsoft specialist for sure.
You'll need a separate server called an Orchestrator server,
and this performs things like the inventory process,
exactly what are those file shares, how many files,
how much storage are we talking about. Now,
technically you can get away with using the source server as your Orchestrator,
but if you're going to be doing this to any degree of scale,
you'll want to set up a separate Windows Server Azure Orchestrator host.
The UI, or the user interface front end, is actually Windows Admin Center.
And that's good, because number one,
Windows Admin Center features on both AZ‑800 and 801,
so it's a tool you need to be familiar with at any rate.
And number two, I like it because it's so universal.
It runs in a browser,
so as long as you can get to the WAC service running on a server,
doesn't matter whether you're on Linux, Mac,
or Windows, or even a mobile device.
Pretty convenient.
So, in summary, we're looking to steal the identity of the source machine.
We may have an older,
down‑level file server that we ultimately want to
decommission. How can we with minimal muss,
fuss, or greasy aftertaste, transfer not only those file shares,
but also their security configuration.
You might've put quite a bit of time, for instance,
in discretionary access control lists and NTF permissions. You also may have
local users and groups on the source server. Believe it or not,
storage migration can handle all of that stuff as well.
The goal is the new server hosting those file shares will be indistinguishable from a client standpoint from the source server.