Now let's take a look at the architecture.
This diagram is from the Microsoft Docs,
and as usual, you can see an attribution in the lower left corner of the slide.
Let's take the diagram from the bottom up.
We've got in our on‑premises environment a collection of not
only Windows Server SMB file servers that are running a
various collection of versions, all the way down,
believe it or not, to Windows Server 2003.
Long out of support by Microsoft.
So Storage Migration Service can help you with longstanding issues.
Like we have these archaic servers that we know are vulnerable
because they're no longer supported by Microsoft.
Let's move those file shares without interrupting our application services
and users to a newer local server or maybe even to Azure.
Now there's also compatibility here for NetApp storage appliances,
as well as Linux machines running Samba,
the file server.
But we're concerned for AZ‑801's sake mainly the Windows Server scenario.
So this is showing a separate host acting as the Storage
Migration Service orchestrator that does the inventory and
migration and cutover process for you.
And then, as I said, destination‑wise,
you can stay on‑premises and migrate to new Windows Server physical servers,
virtual machines, Azure Stack, IaaS clusters,
but you also have the capability of doing Azure Migrate
Server Migration to just go ahead and migrate those servers
in entirety as IaaS Azure VMs.
And then most recently, if you're not interested in doing full server migration,
you can use Azure File Sync as a way to extend and
consolidate your local file shares.
And it's a really neat service.
We'll learn more about it next that can actually solve a
whole bunch of different problems.
It's hard to summarize AFS in just one sentence.
The Storage Migration Service workflow is really three steps.
One,
we need to perform an inventory to know what's there
with regard to those file shares, their access control lists,
all of that good stuff.
We then perform the transfer.
And then lastly, we cutover.
Now that cutover is pretty significant because it may very
well involve you mapping IP addresses,
which the Storage Migration Service can also help you accomplish.
Because after all,
you don't want to mess up any drive mappings or any other connections that use,
say, DNS or maybe even an IPv4 address.
You want the target server, in all likelihood,
to maintain those mappings, and you can do that. Now let's take a look at migration to Azure file shares.