Plan your journey to Azure SQL with confidence

[Guest ajith-k]

Overview

 

 

Azure SQL offers both Platform-as-a-Service (Azure SQL Managed Instance and Azure SQL Database) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (SQL Server running on Azure VMs) targets when planning for migration and modernization of SQL Server to Azure. Identifying the Azure SQL target that is right-sized for each SQL Server deployed on-premises can become arduous when dealing with datacenters with large number of servers.

 

 

 

The SQL Server Discovery and Assessment feature in Azure Migrate simplifies this process with at-scale agentless discovery and assessment. It also presents a unified view of all the identified resources, dependencies, target recommendations and cost estimations. This enables you to take data-driven decisions and plan your migration and modernization journey with confidence.

 

 

 

SQL Discovery and Assessment at-scale using Azure Migrate

 

 

You can discover and assess SQL Servers running on VMware vCenter, Microsoft Hyper-V and Physical/Bare-metal server environments, and IaaS environments in all public clouds such as Azure VM, AWS EC2, etc. The assessment evaluates the databases against all Azure SQL targets and provides recommendations based on your choice of migration strategy to either optimize cost or modernize to PaaS.

 

 

 

With additional recent improvements, we are happy to announce the General Availability of the SQL Server Discovery and Assessment in Azure Migrate. You can read the detailed announcement here : General Availability of SQL Server Discovery and Assessment in Azure Migrate.

 

 

 

While there are additional details in the announcement, here are some key features that make your planning more:

 

1. Secure: The option of using credentials with least privileges improves your security posture by ensuring that discovery and assessment uses a customized set of read-only permissions.
   
2. Comprehensive: SQL Server high availability and disaster recovery configurations such Always On Failover Cluster Instances and Always On Availability Groups are automatically identified and recommendations for appropriate Azure SQL deployments meeting the same compute redundancy and replica type and number requirements are provided.
   
3. Customizable: You can tailor your assessment to your specific requirements by specifying migration strategy - Modernize to PaaS / Cost Optimized and environment type - Dev / Test / Prod. In addition you can get accurate cost estimates that take into account not just your target location, but also any offer/licensing programs you may already have and savings options you may want to leverage.
   
4. Detailed: Automated in-depth readiness analysis and performance-based sizing generates deployment recommendations that are right-sized for each instance. You can also get detailed reasonings for the recommendations, identify estimated Monthly compute and storage costs and understand the steps to migrate (Migration guidance).
   

 

 

 

Get Started

 

 

Get started today with a free Azure account. Azure Migrate is free to use. However, any additional resources created for migration may incur charges.

 

 

 

What's next?

 

 

This article is the first of a series that will discuss all the capabilities of SQL Discovery and Assessment that can help you over the course of your journey to Azure. In subsequent article(s) we will touch upon the following:

 

• Getting Ready: Review the range of migration tools, pre-requisites, appliance installation and discovery.
  
• TCO estimation and comparison, and Dependency mapping: Use the discovery data to generate a data-driven directional business case. We will also discuss the agentless dependency mapping feature that you can use to identify interdependencies.
  
• SQL Assessment in-depth: We will take a deep-dive into how SQL Assessments can be generated and the information generated from the assessment.
  
• Deployment and Migration: This topic will discuss how you can use the recommendations generated from previous steps to deploy an appropriate target environment and migrate your data.
  

More Information

 

1. Learn more about Azure SQL
   
2. Check out the Data Migration Guide.
   
3. Learn more about Azure Migrate.
   
4. Get migration assistance from the Azure Migration and Modernization Program
   

 

Continue reading...