This service facilitates the seamless migration of your physical Windows Server workloads to Microsoft Azure. Our team ensures a smooth transition, minimizing downtime and ensuring that your server's functionality is maintained throughout the process.

We begin with a comprehensive assessment of your existing physical server environment to understand the current setup, dependencies, and potential challenges. Based on this assessment, we develop a detailed migration plan tailored to your specific needs, including selecting the appropriate migration tools and strategies.

We leverage Azure Migrate to assess and migrate your physical servers. This tool helps in evaluating the readiness of your servers for migration and provides insights into potential issues. We create an image of your physical server and securely transfer it to Azure, ensuring that all your data, applications, and settings are preserved.

Post-migration, we conduct rigorous testing to ensure that your server is functioning correctly in the Azure environment. This includes validating network connectivity, application performance, and data integrity. Our team provides ongoing support to address any issues that may arise after the migration, including troubleshooting, performance optimization, and ensuring that your server continues to operate smoothly in Azure.

The benefits of this service include scalability, cost efficiency, enhanced security, and high availability. You can easily scale your server resources up or down based on your needs without the constraints of physical hardware. You can also reduce costs associated with maintaining physical hardware and take advantage of Azure's pay-as-you-go pricing model. Additionally, you will benefit from Azure's robust security features, including advanced threat protection and compliance with industry standards. Finally, you can ensure high availability and disaster recovery with Azure's built-in redundancy and backup solutions.

To get started, you will need access to the physical server and necessary credentials, an Azure subscription with the required resources provisioned, and network connectivity between the physical server and Azure.

IT Partner responsibilities #

• Create a new recovery vault
• Start to prepare the infrastructure; this is done by choosing your protection goals -- to replicate machines to Azure from the source
• Prepare the Assessment and Migration Server
• Provide assessment report and Azure estimates
• Enable replication for the server. this is where you select the source environment that was set up previously, the target environment (such as the storage account) to replicate the VM, the destination virtual network, and a VM that has mobility service installed

After migration, virtual machines will be running in Azure. Depending on how you have your Azure environment set up, if you have a site-to-site VPN or an Azure ExpressRoute, and if we migrated the virtual machine to be in the virtual network associated with the VPN or ExpressRoute, you can then change your on-premises DNS settings to point to the new Azure private IP and connect to it. Provided that virtual machines have replicated successfully, we can then decommission on-premises or virtual servers.

Client responsibilities #

• Provide a dedicated point of contact responsible for working with IT Partner and coordinate any outside vendor resources and schedules
• Configure all networking equipment, such as load balancers, routers, firewalls, and switches
• Provide access to physical and virtual servers and/or systems and services, as needed; provide remote and/or physical access to facility and systems required to complete the work
• Provide a Windows 2008R2 or later server to be used as the migration agent.
• Perform changes to internal and external DNS, as required

Outside the scope of this project (additional cost items) #

• Network configuration

Upon completion of the project, we will provide a project closeout report. This document will indicate the final project status, including evidence of meeting acceptance criteria, outstanding issues (if any), and the final budget. If you require more extensive documentation, this can be provided for an additional fee.

Plan #

The plan may vary depending on your needs.

1. Kickoff meeting
2. Define what we should migrate
3. Install assessment server, gather statistics
4. Provide assessment report and Azure estimate
5. Install migration agent
6. Start migration in background
7. Final server move
8. Verify and fix issues, if any

Results #

You have modernized your infrastructure with the hybrid-cloud Azure-based solution.