Tools can help, but they are no magic
wands
Your Azure migration is about more than
just VMs
Tools are often part of a lift-and-shift strategy. It may
seem tempting to lean toward tools that fast-track
your workloads to Azure, but there are also some
things to consider when deciding on the tools that
you use.
If you are primarily lifting and shifting existing
workloads to Azure, Virtual Machines will likely make
up the majority of your Azure environment, but there
are multiple considerations beyond VMs that require
strategy and prioritisation. Some other pieces to the
Azure puzzle that require a closer look are:
While these tools can help you migrate workloads
rapidly, doing so often comes at the expense of
developing a design better-optimized for Azure.
Don’t be afraid to use the migration to Azure as an
opportunity to undertake some vital housekeeping.
»» Connectivity
How will end users access workloads in Azure, and
what will the end-user experience be like? Do you
need ExpressRoute to support your connectivity
and security goals, or can you achieve your goals
with VPN connections?
Second, the third-party tools cost money, and
Microsoft offers many native Azure tools and
services that can provide the same functions without
spending extra money on third-party products. If
you do decide to lift-and-shift, consider the Microsoft
tools first.
»» Storage
Later in this paper, we will talk about storage
redundancy options, but you also have options
for storage performance. The most common
option, Managed Storage, has both Premium
and Standard tiers to support a variety of IOPS
requirements.
5
Patching Changes
Just in the past year alone, we have witnessed two major eye-opening security
breaches (WannaCry and Spectre) that remind us of the need for a strong focus
on security and understanding how the responsibility lies. Microsoft automatically
patches Azure infrastructure, PaaS and SaaS services for you. The client is then
only responsible for IaaS VM patching, which can be completed through Microsoft
Operations Management Suite.
3
6
Designing for Solution Resiliency
Resiliency is the combination of high availability and disaster recovery. Whatever your application needs, Azure
has you covered from storage and compute resiliency through backup and disaster recovery solutions. Keep the
following concepts in mind as you design your solutions:
»» Azure storage comes in locally redundant, zone redundant and geo redundant storage.
With locally redundant storage, your data is stored across servers in multiple physical
racks in the same datacenter. Zone redundancy adds a second data center in the same
geographical region, while geo-redundancy replicates the data to a datacenter in another
region. Prices go up as the redundancy goes up, so be sure to pick the right level of
redundancy for your workload.
»» Azure Availability Sets keep the virtual machines in separate update and failure domains. For workloads that
have application level high availability, this prevents either planned or unplanned downtime from impacting
all nodes at the same time. For example, placing two nodes of an Always On SQL cluster in an availability set
results in the two nodes living in different physical racks and having different update schedules.
»» When it comes to backing up workloads in or to Azure, you have a myriad of options. MARS, the Microsoft
Azure Recovery Service, provides easy backups for simple workloads that you want to backup directly to
Azure. MABS, the Microsoft Azure Backup Server, is a free solution that supports disk-to-disk to cloud for more
complex workloads like SQL. DPM, Data Protection Manager, Microsoft’s backup solution from the System
Center Suite, can either be run in Azure or configured to backup to Azure. It has the most flexibility in terms of
supported workloads and backup targets.
In many cases, the best way to achieve your resiliency goals is to consider using Azure’s PaaS solutions like Azure
SQL. With Elastic Database tools and built-in backups, Azure SQL can support demanding resiliency requirements
natively.
7
Using Azure tools to control costs
One of the most attractive facets to Azure is the flexibility; flexibility within Azure is the most powerful lever
for controlling costs because you can easily right-size and reduce use when VMs are not needed and, in turn,
streamline and optimise your spend.
We suggest under-sizing your virtual machines, not only because this can save you money and because many
times businesses tend to have over-sized virtual machines, but also because it is simpler to upsize, if needed, than
downsize.
Beyond planning for VM size, your purchasing model has a huge impact on costs, as reserved VM instances and
hybrid-use benefit can significantly optimise Azure compute costs. Finally, as a final layer of cost control, you
can utilise other Microsoft technologies like Power BI analytics dashboards, and New Signature’s own Cloud
Management Portal as a self-service tool to gain insight into your usage and spend.
4
Please complete the form to gain access to this content
