Azure offers you the ability to run your SQL Server workloads with optimized costs, greater flexibility, scalability, and availability along with a strong security and compliance posture all the while simplifying management and monitoring.
That being said, moving databases to cloud can be a very significant decision for any business. Comparing different migration strategies, associated costs and estimating cashflow changes is crucial to making an informed decision. This can be daunting if you have a significant estate size requiring a lot of person-hours to evaluate, especially in the current economic situation.
Azure Migrate Business Case
Azure Migrate Business Case, a new feature in Azure Migrate that is now in public preview (see announcement here), can help you plan this journey with confidence.
Automate analysis of the SQL Server deployments running in your VMware environments (Hyper-V and physical servers will be added soon) to generate a business case including:
- Estimated On-Premises vs Azure total cost of ownership
- Year-on-Year cashflow projection based on a phased migration approach
- Resource utilization-based insights to identify candidates ideal for cloud with right-size recommendations for Azure
- End of support Windows and SQL Server deployed versions that can quickly benefit from migration
- Long term cost savings from moving to operating expenditure model from a capital expenditure model.
How to get started
- If you already have an active Azure Migrate project, you can skip this step. If you have not created one yet, follow this tutorial to create an Azure Migrate project and setup the appliance. Now sit back and let the appliance do all the initial work of discovering the servers and SQL Server instances running on them (More information: How discovery works).
- In the Azure Migrate project, navigate to the summary of the discovered IT estate, click on Build business case.
Azure Migrate project summary view
- Now you can create the Azure Migrate Business Case with minimal input and a single click.
Create a business case
Migration Strategy
Based on your business priorities, you can choose between the following migration strategies:
- Azure recommended approach to minimize cost: This is the default and prioritizes cost efficiency when recommending compatible targets across Azure IaaS and PaaS offerings.
- Migrate to all IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service): Prioritizes quick lift and shift and recommends compatible Azure IaaS offerings.
- Modernize to PaaS (Platform as a Service): Prioritizes cost efficient Azure PaaS offerings where compatible. Azure PaaS offerings are fully managed and have built-in availability and disaster recovery options along with simplified scaling, reducing administration costs.
What-If Analysis
The business case report presents both an overview and detailed estimate reports for On-Premises Vs Azure costs, Azure IaaS and Azure PaaS costs. You can easily validate different what-if scenarios by editing the assumptions and recalculating the business case or compare different scenarios by creating multiple business cases with different assumptions.
Get Started Today
The Azure Migrate Business Case feature is in public preview. Head on over to the Azure Portal to try it out.
- View this brief video to see Azure Migrate Business Case in action.
- Get more details from our documentation.
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Get free migration assistance for your cloud journey. Azure migration and modernization program (AMMP) is a comprehensive assistance program for all your migration and modernization needs. Join AMMP today.