Azure Migrate - Assess Physical Servers

Azure Migrate is a product that's been in the Azure portfolio since 2017, when it was first launched it was capable of helping customers assess their VMware estates and understanding how to move those on prem workloads to the Cloud. As the product has matured it has added new features and grown into the hub for organisations looking to move to the Cloud.

At Ignite 2019 the team announced that Azure Migrate was adding the new capability of being able to assess and migrate physical server workloads that exist on prem to the Azure!

I know from conversations that a lot of customers want and need this feature from an assessment and migration perspective.

Assessment

Assessing your servers and understanding what is in your environment and making sure you know how it all pieces together is important regardless of what migration strategy you are using to move to the Cloud with. I always encourage anyone thinking of adopting the Cloud to do an assessment of their environment. And an assessment is more than running a tool on your environment and getting a pretty spreadsheet of results out, it's speaking to stakeholders, it's speaking to suppliers, it's plotting out the next five or ten years for that application and understanding if you still want it, it's understanding what data you hold and what laws or standards you need to adhere to in storing that data, it's a million different things.

However, the starting point is always running a tool through your environment to catalogue your servers and understand how they all interconnect.

Using Azure Migrate on your physical servers

To assess your physical servers and get data back into Azure Migrate for analysis the process is slightly different from how you assess virtual machines.

In this short video I take you through that process:

The Azure Migrate: Server Assessment tool can be installed on any server within your environment, physical or virtual as long as it's running Windows Server 2016. The tool itself doesn't need to run on the servers you are assessing just be able to see them on your network.

More information on the prerequisites you need to ensure are in place before assessing your physical servers check out the official documentation.

Can I view my physical and virtual assessments together?

If you set up one Azure Migrate project within your Azure subscription and then point your physical assessment tool towards that project and your virtual assessment tool to that project when you go to analyse the data it will all be together. So the data around your physical and virtual workloads will be in one view and you can assess them as they are on prem, as one big datacentre.

There is no need to spin up seperate projects for the different types of servers unless of course that is how you want to set them up for cost or migration purposes.

Call to Action

The feature is currently in preview at the moment, and generally while Azure services or products are within that part of the service lifecycle I wouldn't recommend utilising them within a production environment, however I personally think this is a service you can use now. So don't delay, give it a go and evaluate your physical servers for a move to Azure!