Complete a migration assessment of an on-premise vSphere environment.

Hey,

Welcome to my blog on assessing and moving on-premises server workloads, into the Azure cloud using Azure migrate and Azure site recovery. 

The process starts off by assessing the VMWare environment using Azure migrate. You download and configure an appliance that collects information about your vCenter server and it's virtual machines.This stage is important because the collector appliance provides information to Azure for which it will then generate a report. You can then use this report to assess cloud readiness, running costs and migration methods. Some migrations will work better using IaaS (Virtual machine in a vNet) and some with PaaS offerings (Azure SQL databases and App service plans).

There are a few things we need to have before we begin and migration projects have two phases. The first is discovering and assessing workloads so you can plan what needs to be migrated to Azure and how you are going to do it. The second is utilising Azure Site Recovery to configure replication for those workloads.

Requirements:

• Azure virtual network.
• Azure storage account dedicated to migrations.
• Add an Azure recovery services vault.
• Add a new Azure migration project created in the portal.
• A vSphere account with admin privileges. (Administrator@vsphere.local)
• The collector appliance downloaded from the azure migration project in the portal.
• The configuration appliance downloaded from the Recovery Services vault in Azure.

If you already have the Azure Infrastructure in place, feel free to skip forwards.

Prepare Azure

Configure an Azure Virtual Network

Here is a quick reminder on how to configure an Azure vNet if you do not have one already. Ensure that your subnet CIDR block is large enough to accommodate the amount of virtual machines in your Infrastructure. For example if you have 500 virtual machines that need migrating, a /24 subnet will not be big enough! 

Configure an Azure Storage account

The storage account will assist the migration by storing the virtual machines we migrate from the on-premises network.

Add a recovery services vault

Azure migrate is the analysis tool but the actual "doing" of the migration is performed with the recovery services vault and replication. We need a vault for the "doing" part.

Create a new migration project

The migration project will house our discovery, cost analysis, SKU types and metrics assessment data. You can also re-assess environments should they change.

Phase 1 - Discover and Assess

Download the collector appliance and import it, into vCenter server.

The appliance can be downloaded from the discovery section of a migration project.

If you have not configured a vCenter server appliance, go here to my guide on how to do this:

DEPLOY VCENTER SERVER

Import the .OVA file into vSphere

Once downloaded, use the vSphere web client, right click on the data center and choose deploy OVF (Open Virtualisation Format) template.

Start and configure the appliance

Connect to the vCenter web client and start the appliance. Once it has booted up, start the collector service with the icon on the desktop. Proceed through the configuration pages and ensure each step completes successfully.

Specify your vCenter server credentials. In this case I used the vSphere administrator account but in production, you will likely be given or create a delegated account.

Copy the project ID and the key from the 'Discovery' section if the migration project page in Azure.

Once complete, Azure will collect data about the vCenter server environment, it may take a while based on how much data there is collect, and the retention settings of the vCenter server logs. If you find that Azure is missing data or not collecting enough, consider changing log settings of vCenter server.

Refer to this VMware article if you need more verbose logging and statistics:

Create an assessment

Now that the collection of our data is finished, we need to create an assessment in Azure to view the data, check the video below on how to do that: