As business demands evolve, applications must be modernized or replaced. To maximize business value, organizations are leveraging cloud technologies. Accelerating the movement of workloads to the public cloud is the key driver to achieving this goal. However, cloud adoption and migration are not one-size-fits-all workloads. CIOs and decision makers identify and prioritize the IT capabilities that are critical to business, which deliver maximum benefits with minimal effort to migrate.
The key steps in cloud migration planning
Organizations usually conduct a comprehensive application portfolio assessment to gather applications, infrastructure, and business context data. This data is used to discover, analyze, and plan for moving the portfolio to the cloud. As a result of these assessments, customers typically tag the applications that are ready to migrate to the cloud immediately, applications that require effort to migrate, and applications that will never or will not migrate in the foreseeable future. The outcome of these assessments generates high confidence migration waves.
Migrations streamlined through Arc
The cloud migration journey is a multi-step process that can take several months to complete depending on the scale and complexity. The essential steps include discovering, assessing, planning, and finally migrating with minimal impact on the workload. As the first step of the migration journey, “SQL Server enabled by Azure Arc” extends Azure services to SQL Server instances hosted outside of Azure. This immediately drives operational efficiencies and cost savings. The aim of “SQL Server enabled by Azure Arc” is to deliver the best-in-class migration and modernization experience to SQL Server customers hosted anywhere outside of Azure by connecting SQL Server to Arc. This experience provides flexibility, reduced TCO, and a seamless migration journey, all while staying connected to Azure.
The workloads that are not migrating soon still benefit from Arc SQL Server capabilities to optimize the operational costs. Azure Arc enables you to manage all your SQL Servers from a single point of control: Azure.
As a first step in enabling an end-to-end and fully automated migration journey, soon we will release Azure SQL migration assessment in our Arc SQL Server service. Arc SQL Server continuously assesses the SQL Server estate and provides readiness and optimal Azure SQL size recommendations. Here is a sample assessment report below.
- Readiness assessment: Discover, assess, and measure the Azure SQL readiness of the Arc-enabled SQL Servers. This will help identify the SQL Server workloads that are ready to migrate, identify any migration risks, and provide mitigation recommendations.
- Azure SQL size recommendations: Get best-fit recommendations, including right-sizing based on performance history and service tier recommendations.
Call for action
Navigate to any one of the “SQL Server – Azure Arc” resources on the Azure portal. Click on the new Migration section and Assessment. Take a sneak peek at the sample report and provide us with feedback on what other insights you would like us to provide that would assist in making migration decisions and planning. If you are interested in influencing this feature through your engagement, please let us know.
