In this demonstration,
we'll take a look at Azure Migrate: Server Migration.
Now what are we looking at here?
We're actually looking at a Windows Server 2022 member server called MEM1.
And if I bring up Hyper‑V Manager,
I want you to see I have a virtual machine called core1. I
actually got a connection to it right here.
It's just a Windows Server Core virtual machine, and that is our migration goal.
That is to say we're looking to get this into Azure with minimal muss,
fuss, and greasy aftertaste to quote the great Mark Minasi, if that name
means anything to you. Now the process of migrating,
say, a Hyper‑V VM singly maybe isn't that big of a deal.
You can just manually create the VM in Azure, specifying your chosen parameters,
your chosen properties. And as long as the VHD of the given
virtual machine is of the right generation and fixed rather
than dynamically expanding, you're good to go, right? Well, yeah,
that's fine for one VM.
But the idea here is you may have who knows how many dozens,
hundreds, thousands of virtual machines, so we're working with
potential at much greater scale.
So, let's head into the portal here. And if we go over to Azure Migrate,
which you can easily find in the global search, just do a search for
migrate, and it's a bit overwhelming at first,
let's be honest, because there are a number of migration goals.
I'll start at the bottom. Data Box would be where you just
have potentially large volumes of static data that you want
to get into Azure Storage.
So you can essentially rent a storage appliance from
Microsoft, pack it with your data, send it in.
There's both online and offline versions of Data Box.
We'll look at Web apps later, so I'm going to skip that. VDI
stands for virtual desktop infrastructure.
Basically, you're taking your on‑premises VDI and
bringing it into Azure Virtual Desktop.
If you're just looking at databases,
there is a separate set of tools for database assessment and
migration and not only SQL Server, interestingly.
And then lastly, we have this catch all migration goal called servers,
databases, and web apps.
It used to be just called servers, but now it's more robust.
And what I want you to see here is initially this is a blank screen.
Let me see if I have another project.
No, I don't.
So notice that you can use this pill to navigate among multiple
projects. And when you create a top‑level project,
you're just basically specifying where it lives in your
subscription and resource groups,
your geography, and then the project name. You can do public
endpoint or private endpoint if you want to connect to your
project on a private IP address.
When you create a project,
you then choose an assessment tool and a migration tool, and notice that
we can add more assessment tools by clicking, and this brings in some of
the independent software vendor stuff that's not on the exam, but the
idea is that you and your business may already have a license, so why not
take advantage of those? I'm going to assume, and the AZ‑801 exam assumes
that you're using the Microsoft assessment and Microsoft migration tools.
Okay, first we do an assessment. And again, I've already done
all the work here, so it's all filled in.
When you first come in here, it'll be empty.
You'll go to Discover, and you'll choose, well, are we
going to download and use the appliance,
which I definitely recommend you do, otherwise you can do an import from
a CSV by downloading and completing this template.
I like the appliance because it's easier and much more dynamic. Are your
servers virtualized? And depending upon what you choose here,
VMware, Hyper‑V or physical,
you'll get a different download link. I did Hyper‑V
for my case. You name the appliance,
it generates a project key that you'll need to configure on the appliance,
you then download the VHD at 12 GB pre‑configured Windows Server machine,
and then you set it up and initiate discovery. And at the end of that
discovery process, you'll see this dashboard here, Discovered servers, and
these links are all hyperlinked where you can drill into them and look in
greater detail of what's happened and what's brought in. And as you can see
here,
I've got my core1. This is that server core virtual machine that I
showed you a moment ago that's running on my host, MEM1. The reason I
don't have or don't see software inventory or dependencies is that I
chose not to go that route.
You can install the Log Analytics agent on your host and
your VMs, and that gives you much richer insight in your
discovery because as you see here,
you've got the capability of inventorying all the installed
software, as well as visualizing dependencies.
So the idea with that is you go to Dependency analysis,
Add servers. And as long as they meet the requirements,
you can select them here and add them in.
Again, I chose not to do that in this case, whether you do that or not.
But let me go back to Azure Migrate: Server Migration,
and let's pick up where we left off.
Okay, so I've got two discovered servers.
One that's been identified as Windows, one unknown. That's a
VM that's in a really messed up state.
I'm not going to migrate that one.
You then create your assessments.
You organize those assessments into groups because you very well might
want to do your migration in phases, all right? We can review our
appliance metadata, any notifications or groups.
The assessment takes place after discovery, and
notice that there's four templates, two of which are in public preview.
The one we're concerned with is Azure VM. And what we do here is we choose our
discovery source. Did we use a CSV or the appliance? And then we go to our
Assessment settings, and we choose what are our assumptions in the assessment?
Where in Azure do you plan the VMs to go?
Do you know in advance what kind of managed disk type you'd
use? Are you going to use reserved instances?
You can see this. I don't need to read this, but it really allows you to
add assumptions that will have a good personalization effect on that
assessment result, okay? So let me come out of this assessment. I have an
assessment created. It looks like I've got two for Azure VM, two for SQL.
Let's go to that hyperlink. And we can see my core1 assessment. Let's
click into it.
It just gives you some visualizations, as you can see here.
Now it says the confidence rating of the assessment
is low. Wait for at least, okay, that was my problem.
Remember earlier in this module, I mentioned that
the longer your assessment period, the better results you're going to get.
Yes,
especially if you choose not the as is on‑prem
option, but the performance‑based.
So the longer you wait, as it says here,
ensure that you wait for at least a day after starting discovery before creating your assessment.