From the course: Microsoft Azure Database Administrator Associate (DP-300) Cert Prep by Microsoft Press

Evaluate requirements for the migration

From the course: Microsoft Azure Database Administrator Associate (DP-300) Cert Prep by Microsoft Press

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Evaluate requirements for the migration

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- Welcome back. This is Lesson 3.1: Evaluate requirements for the migration. When evaluating the requirements for migrating, there's a few key phases you really need to look at. I'll highlight them here on this slide, then discuss them in more detail in subsequent slides. Now, let's begin with the discovery phase. When you start your cloud migration journey, it's critical to discover installed software, web apps, and SQL server instances and databases running in your on-premises environment. This discovery helps you tailor a migration path to Azure. Then, there's the business cases phase. The business case capability helps you build a business proposal to understand how Azure can bring the most value to your business. Then, there's the assessment phase. The assessment is the analysis of configuration, utilization, and performance data collected during the discovery phase. Then, there's the conversion phase. This is the process of converting database schema and objects into equivalent Transact-SQL syntax in the cases where the source and target database engines may differ. Then, the actual migration phase. The actual migration part. Migrating the database from on-premises to Azure. Now, let's talk about these in more detail. Discovery is the process of understanding all that you have on-premises to help tailor a good migration path to Azure. You start by answering what your technology landscape looks like. When you start your cloud migration journey, it's critical to get an idea of the applications and SQL server instances and databases running in your on-premises environment. As we talked about last slide, this helps you tailor a good solid migration path to Azure SQL. Then, there's the applications. What applications are connecting to those instances and databases? How are they connecting and what changes would you need to make on either the database or application side to support the new environment? And the security. How is security configured on-premises? What groups and users need to be migrated? Luckily, there's a number of tools that will help you answer some of these questions, help you look at what your technology on-premises landscape looks like. And the first one is Azure Migrate. The Azure Migrate appliance performs this discovery using the Windows OS domain or non-domain credentials, or SQL server authentication credentials that have access to your SQL server instances and databases. This discovery is agentless. Meaning that nothing's installed on your servers. The Azure Migrate appliance supports Discovery on various virtual platforms as well, like VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, and physical environments. Then, there's the MAP toolkit, the Microsoft Assessment and Planning toolkit. While Microsoft recommends using the Azure Migrate for Discovery, the Microsoft Assessment and Planning toolkit is also an agent planning tool for server and cloud migrations with Readiness Assessment Reports. But Microsoft does recommend using Azure Migrate. All right, let's talk about the business case. The business case capability helps you build a solid business proposal to understand how Azure can bring the most value to your business. It highlights several things. Total cost of ownership between on-premises and Azure. Insight how to modernize your environments as you migrate. Resource utilization insights to help identify workloads that are ideal for Azure. Quick wins, migration and modernization, including end of support Windows and OS and SQL server versions. And cost, savings by moving from CapEx, Capital Expenditure to OpEx, Operational Expenditure. Meaning, paying for only what you use. The Assessment phase. The assessment is the analysis of performance configuration and utilization data collected during the Discovery phase that we talked about earlier. This analysis is used to measure the readiness and estimate the effect of migrating on-premises SQL server instances to different Azure SQL targets, Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Managed Instance, or SQL Server in a virtual machine, for example. Assessments on SQL server instances can be run using Azure Arc for SQL Server or Azure Migrate, or the Azure Database Migration Service Extension and Azure Data Studio. Then given that information, an Azure SQL assessment provides two sizing criteria. First is performance-based. Assessments that make recommendations based on collected performance data, followed by on-premises assessments that make recommendations based on the on-premises SQL server configuration alone. Now, after the assessment determines the readiness and the recommended Azure SQL deployment type, it computes a specific service tier and Azure SQL configuration. Common like the SKU size. And this that can meet or exceed the on-premises SQL server performance. This calculation depends on whether you're using an on-premises or performance-based sizing criteria. All right, let's talk about conversion. While you're migrating data from one database to another, it's important to convert database schema and objects into equivalent transact SQL syntax as the source and target different databases engines may be different. If you're going from a SQL server to Azure SQL Managed instance or SQL Server in a virtual machine, may not be any conversion, but this needs to be considered. If there's any conversion, the database objects can include, may or may not be limited to the following. So, tables, indexes, database types, T-SQL or Transact-SQL, store procedures, queries, and some of the features may have to be rewritten. Now, a lot of these may come into play if you're upgrading to a newer version of SQL, for example. As some syntax data types or features may not be supported on newer versions. Now, I threw in optional here because like I said, if you're going from on-premises SQL Server to SQL Server Managed Instance, or SQL Server Virtual Machine, there may not be much conversion, if any. All right, the actual migration. This is the last stage of the process in which the data is migrated from source database to the target database. Azure Migration, Azure Database Migration Service, commonly called the DMS, is a fully managed service designed to enable seamless migrations from multiple database sources to the many Azure data platforms. So, we talked about DMS. I referred to that on the last slide. This is the Database Migration Service. This powers the Azure SQL Migration Extension for Azure Data Studio, and provides more features. The Azure Portal, PowerShell and the Azure CLI can also be used to access the Database Migration Service. Currently, it supports SQL database modernization to Azure. For improved functionality and supportability, consider migrating to Azure SQL database using the DMS. So, you can use the Azure portal. And then, there's the classic. So, the DMS Classic. This is via the Azure Portal PowerShell or the Azure CLI. It's an older version of the Azure Database Migration Service. It offers database modernization to Azure and support scenarios like SQL Server Postgres, MySQL, and MongoDB.

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