Azure@IBM

Azure Migrate Overview – Part I of III

Azure Migrate is a product that is available for any Azure subscription. In many cases the product can be used at no additional cost. The name of the tool hides the overall value that it provides. I wanted to write this series of articles to help increase the value of the tool for any organization as they plan their cloud journey.  

The series will include three parts:

Part I – Overview

Part II – Implementation

Part III – Reporting

Let's get started with the overview.

Details about Azure Migrate can be found here. From my perspective and use, Azure Migrate provides the following value without installing an agent and with a zero trust security approach that starts with read only access:

1.       Azure Migrate can discover and assess your vShpere environments with read only access (it does Hyper-V as well). This allows the power of Azure and VMWare to work together to pull the data you need to understand your environment.

2.       It will develop a recommendation of like for like migration to Azure or suggest an optimized solution based on the discovery data collected.

3.       Azure Migrate pulls from the same data source as the Azure calculator helping you understand the costs of migrating a system to Azure.

4.       With local system access, Azure migrate can pull the application inventory and also begin dependency mapping at a network level between systems that communicate with each other for application data.

5.       The data collected can the be used in building a business case within the tool.

The tool goes beyond just migration. It provides the capability to discover and assess your environment. Customers often give me a spread sheet that represents a point of view and a snap shot of time for their planning. These rarely equate to the reality of their landscape and often, we are working to essentially make the CMDB better than it was. This tool can help bring real time data, that assists data driven migration decisions based on reality, instead of a best guess.

If you don't have it in your environment, you really need to install it.

I look forward to sharing more as we talk about implementation in part II.

About John West:

John started his journey in technology with a Sinclair ZX80 and has continued his passion for enabling people with computers ever since. He spent 25 years with Microsoft tackling the toughest migration challenges and enabling organizations. To date, he has help transform the operation of ~500k servers and the individual experience of nearly 1 Million users. His focus today is to keep bringing benefits to companies and individuals leveraging the best that technology has to offer.