 Hi everybody, welcome to the latest episode of from the rock to the cloud and as always we're gonna talk about The latest technology that comes from a Microsoft perspective all around server 2022 around Azure and all of that exciting stuff now It's kind of like this is Thanksgiving week when it was last week. So I've got a turkey On my on my little screen for everybody. So, you know, we're gonna we're gonna give thanks for the amazing Microsoft server and cloud technology and Who else? We want to give thanks to somebody who's just been, you know, three weeks in Mexico having a lovely holiday And he's totally tuned into this whole sort of wavelength right now. So we've got we've got Pierre. So Pierre say hello to everybody and let them know who you are How you doing? Yeah, how you doing? My name is Pierre Roman. I'm a senior cloud advocate with Microsoft I have done a lot of work in migration over the past few years and I have to admit It's getting easier with every iteration of the products. So but The tool is only one thing It's it's the easiest part of the migration the planning and we can discuss that in a bit is where you We are gonna discuss that and you've jumped ahead straight into talking turkey. Yes We're gonna talk about my great. That's what we're gonna talk about today. Like obviously it's great But we're gonna talk about Azure migrate and you know, let's let's just jump into it. So first of all You know, Roman, what what what is it? Right? That's always the first question, right? I want it. What is Azure migrate? What like what, you know, why someone gonna do it? Well, Azure migrate is a set of tools It's not just one tool. It's kind of like an umbrella. So you create an Azure migrate project And within that project, there are several steps. One is planning your infrastructure two is inventorying your infrastructure and Analyzing your infrastructure then replicating your infrastructure and then actually doing the migration Okay, so So like again, I always try and simplify things. So it this is for people who Really want to modernize like and and and move forward with it, you know, you know, not just from on-prem But maybe from other clouds Scenarios, but you can bring stuff from wherever but it's about consolidating and moving forward and putting it in a safe place So that's right. That's what we're offering. Yeah. Yeah, so you can start from any cloud or physical machine or Machines that aren't I per V or on VM where It you can actually migrate from There is a part of the tool set a data migration assistant. So you can go from Windows or Microsoft sequel to Azure sequel or from something to postgres To anyway to managed instances or to a VM running sequel. So you can actually do the data migration part as well there is a Web app migration assistance as well So if you've got something running like a dot net application running in an IIS server On-prem you can take that and it will analyze figure out the dependencies figure out the languages and the frameworks that you need and Actually build a web app for you So you can do away with the VM that supports that website and migrate directly into a web app So it helps you migrate like VMs to VM But also workloads to where workloads need to be appropriate and migration of a VM I've always told customers that it's only step one because if You migrate a VM from on-prem to the cloud Yes, you are getting some benefit, but you're not utilizing the power of cloud services It's still a VM that you have to manage. It's still a VM that you have to patch and And it has to have your your local accounts and everything else all the management that you would do for it on-prem You still have to do it in the cloud and a VM by itself Doesn't have the same type of redundancy that for a web app, for example or a PaaS service or a native cloud service So I always say migrating is step one and it gives you time To figure out what your next step is going to be in terms of modernizing that workload or Rehosting it re-architecting it or rewriting it And you know, let's let's also bust a myth right now, right? Because a lot of people out there old-school on-prem guys who work in basements, you know, you are you guys are like, yeah And Moving this stuff and migrating it is actually going to create more work and more jobs I just want to miss buff the job Like the whole I'm gonna lose my job because I'm migrating stuff to the cloud piece, right? And it's That is not gonna happen. You there's gonna be more work to do Yes, and I I've been asked since we announced the cloud like it was seven years ago This is question that's been coming back over and over and over again. It's like am I gonna lose my job? I'm a non-prem guy And my answer has been if your only job if like what you do Five days a week eight hours a day or or longer or short in some cases If the only job you do is rock servers and pull cables Then maybe your job will be affected if you're actually Managing the infrastructure managing the servers managing the the networking and the security and or any of those parts Your job is not gonna disappear is actually gonna get become more critical to success because I as for examples when we're moving VM from on-prem to I as so infrastructure as a service It's basically just an extension To your own data center you're you're extending your footprint your data center footprint to a virtual environment That you don't have to pay capital costs for But the management of these pieces is the same because it's still a VM. It's still a virtual network that you have it's still Software-defined networking software-defined storage VMs that connect to that and you have to manage it the same way you're managing your machines on-prem So that's why I always say it's your first step if you want to leverage native cloud benefits well, and it's the same for hybrid clouds because Again, then when you start thinking where you're gonna suddenly put your workloads and data and actually, you know Maybe you're gonna use the stuff on-prem in a different way like maybe you're actually, you know, you like Ultimately for something to get into the cloud. It's gonna be created in the real world, right? So actually there's a date, you know, there's a day to creation Way of thinking about it and that's where kind of the whole edge computing comes into it and all of these kind of things It's just evolved. So it's not a case of like do this and that's, you know, that's the end of it It's it's the beginning. It's you know, it's the antithesis of kind of what hybrid will be For everybody moving forward. So, you know, I think it is really for me It's it's like so let's talk about oh wait, you know, so you've got I was gonna say cuz you because you mentioned hybrid and At the beginning when we first got into Azure the the marketing and maybe mark I'm gonna get a call from marketing in a minute We're keeping this in the show right can we get her on camera That's the real world right there. Sorry. You were just like and I'm gonna get told off by marketing So like we'll let you get back to that All right. Yeah, I'm probably gonna get a call from marketing in a minute because at the beginning The marketing message was move everything to the cloud In 2019 at Ignite Jason Zander, which is the corporate vice president for Azure Uh stood on stage and said what many of us Field have known all along is that Is that uh iBrid Is not a transition period iBrid is going to be our customers end state And that's what we're focusing on now We don't there is always going to be those like crown jewels application or even stuff that is By compliance requirement, you can't migrate to the cloud or because the version of it is sold And it's not supported anymore and and whatnot all of these reasons Say that not everything is always going to go to the cloud Yeah, agreed but It's just so exciting right now like this every single door is open now And a lot of people ask me as well, you know, I've had people come up to me and say, you know, what is Microsoft's Hybrid solution. Well, it's all this amazing stuff in the cloud plus what you've got on-prem all together That's right. You can literally you can literally do anything you want um All right, so let's let let's jump back to As you'll migrate and you know, what what would you say? What's the process? How does what does somebody need to start thinking about through the process? The most important thing is having a clear understanding of what you're starting with Having because I'm sure everybody in the audience listening to this right now is thinking. Yeah, what do you mean? Do you know exactly All of the servers that you have all of the workloads that are running on it Uh, and who owns them in your enterprise? Because I know in the past I've do an inventory you send the blast email to management and you say Here's a list of servers that we have running in our data center uh Who owns this workload? Because you're managing it but but maybe maybe it was put together for a campaign that or a project that Is now done Yeah, nobody told you that they it wasn't needed anymore and you've been managing it for the last year for no apparent reason Yeah, so and then you get you get the the list Uh, I always use the the screen methods for whatever servers. Uh, I can't identify a owner turn it off Don't turn it off If you turn it off something may happen and you won't be able to turn it back on In some cases because if it's old But you unplug it from the network or you disconnect the the virtual nick So it's still running it just can't connect to anything and then you wait for the first person to scream and you go ha You're the owner now And and once you have that figure out what pieces you need because For example, if you migrate a sequel server, that's part of an application a multi-tier application Who knows within your environment whether or not there's not other applications that are using tables On that sequel server as lookups For a customer list for parts numbers for whatever it may be So you move that server and then you end up breaking for other applications that you weren't planning on migrating right away Yeah, you don't want to do that You don't want to do that. So there are tools to allow you to check all of this That are built into Azure migration Azure migrate, sorry So the first thing you do is you you set up your project and you Build your infrastructure or just prepare your infrastructure So if it's if you're migrating physical machine you install an agent on each of them if you're migrating uh a hyper v farm you install a An appliance on that hyper v farm that will then start reading The machine and the network and the traffic and the machine configuration but at the hyper v level and same thing for a to be not a to be us but for VMware if you're migrating from a cloud treat them as physical So install the agent directly on them from a to us or google or whatever other cloud you may be And then treat them as physical and then you can migrate them Once the agents or the appliances are set It will start Gathering information as to the type of machines you have how many you have What ip what sizes they are what? Storage is attached to them and I can even show you if I can share my my screen with you So right now I've got a project and this is a demo environment so I can't change anything This is for me to show you But I started with like you get in there and you go to getting started and you say, okay What do you want to do to migrate server database or web apps? That's a massive cursor look at the size of your cursor Oh, I know this because when I do demos I don't want to have a tiny little cursor and people are wondering what it is So I always set it to big and green They're just they're just trying to be inclusive of people that are It's possibly the name of your future book the big green cursor by Pierre Roman That's an idea. That's an idea. Anyway, let's get back So once you've figured out whether or not you want to migrate servers database over web apps or or other scenarios Then you set it up in your migration tool and your migration tool as like the discovery part Which is you set up your infrastructure once it's done It discovers your machine. So in my demo environment here. I have discovered 21 371 servers And those could be windows of 20,000 of them Linux and unknown and unknown may be Linux distributions that we don't recognize In azure And there are 335 servers that are being right now analyzed for dependencies So if I go to If I can draw drill into specific machines And I see what they are and which group they're in and whether or not there's been assessments done But I can take each of these machines and see what the dependencies are And the dependencies are is it tells me that this particular server Let me zoom in on port 443 there's a hundred other servers that have connected to it So I can drill into that and see what those hundred servers are going to be It's gonna it may take a little while because this is like I said, it's a demo environment There's two servers that have connected to it over port 20 135 And so on say also he gives me the list so I can actually go and check what those servers are Port 80 port 445 anyway, so it gives me all of the the dependencies so everything that is connecting to them and if this server Was itself connecting to something else on that side of the server. I'd have What uh, what the dependencies that server has And I can see what processes are running on that server so I can see Uh, what it actually is running. So is it just running iis? Is it running iis and sequel? Is it running a fact server or whatever? So it tells me all of the the information on there As part of the dependency uh, analysis Which is great and and this is free And this is free. This is out of the box Free out the box partners. You're my great free as in free as beer And then once you've once you've done if you've discovered all of your machines you can group them together So if you've got a bunch of machines that are part of a solution Yeah, you can group them together and then analyze or assess that group Uh to show whether or not So for example this demo appliance. Oh, let's take another one. Okay. So demo appliance this one here Out of all of those machines 95 machines are ready for azure Six are ready, but there's some conditions. So there's some many actions you're gonna have to do on them Zero are not ready and uh, zero are unknown So I know that if I click on this I can say that It's loading the data, but it would tell me what the action I need to do on those particular server Maybe it's got a petabyte of data. So see, uh, these ones are ready. This one is conditionally ready. So this drink and it brings me to the Uh documentation that tells me what's problem. What's the problem with that particular one? So that one's a centOS machine the size Number of disks number of storages on premise. So you can on premises. Sorry, uh, Jeff Wolsey's going to uh Send me an email. That's okay. Well, we haven't had we haven't had him on the show yet. So Oh, well, he's on the he's on the list. He's on the hit list He's definitely the he's definitely the man to uh to talk about the about server. That's for sure But once you've got your assessment because your assessment is going to tell you this is the type of machine you have on prem but based on its Usage based on its CPU usage memory usage storage usage It's going to suggest A size in azure that is appropriate Okay, because if you if you've got like, uh 32 cores and 64 terabytes of ram on a server on prem You may not want to take a machine in the cloud. That's 32 cores and 64 terabytes of ram Yeah, and and and also inversely to that, you know, like you said like the screen method like You know, do you need to move all that to azure? Like right? Do you know what I mean? Like and and I suppose this is the starting point when you said, you know, you're assessing What your project is what, you know It's the same when you do any project What is the end goal? The end goal is I want to achieve this Right, and then you kind of work back from that. And so this is all the way at stage one This is this is the assessing and finding out what I currently got Um, and then you can decide what you need to appropriately move and then then you can start figuring out what that's going to cost you Yes, because this part is the most important part that you need to do Inventory environment analyze it figure out what you can move how you can move it and what to move it to And that's that that's the biggest part Yeah, and the most important because the the next one which is the actual migration Um, now so in this one we've actually discovered, uh, and and we have 708 servers that are ready for migration And I can click on those and it'll give me all the information on those Uh, this one is a Demo environment so there's someone turned off. Okay, so this one tells me that that's got 17 applications on it What the dependencies again, I can see what or what number of cores number memory and so on Yeah But once I've got that and once I'm there All right, let me go back to discovery and management Once I'm there uh, I can I can now start replicating those VMs And once they're replicated Now it's to the point where uh, and the replication happens At the beginning it's a full disk replication Once the the disk is replicated and everything that's written to the disk the agent sends to the replication To the uh, to the the target area And at one point they will tell you that your replication is healthy And then you can start planning your migration and once you get to planning the migration Which I can't do now because I'm in a read-only environment Um, once I've got that I can Do uh dry runs where it would It would spin up that environment in a sandbox Then you can do all of your testing protocols to see is the application behaving the way it's supposed to is the data all there Uh, can I get to it properly? Can I run the reports that I need to run whatever? Testing protocols you've got in place to see that that application is healthy Then if you if you know that it's fine you say okay and the test it cleans up that sandbox area And now you're ready to do that the migration itself and the migration Happens where you create a plan and the plan has multiple steps. So one is for example, if you got a multi multi layered application The first one you would want to uh replicate would be let's say the the database And then the middle aware and then the front end And if you've got active directory in there that it adds a layer of complexity because you first have to decide If I've got active directory, do I extend my active directory? Do I replicate a dc when replicating a dc is not a good idea because you end up with two dcs with the same SID in two different places Yeah, well the again that has to be in your planning ahead of time to say Uh, what is my identity? Um scenario and how am I going to deal with this especially if it's machines In that scenario you can have to cut over from one to the other like that's that's just got disaster in all over Not necessarily because uh, if you're migrating to an area where Uh, you've already got resources and maybe you already have a dc in that environment. Okay So Then you don't have to worry about it But for your test in the sandbox Then for your test you have to replicate a domain controller, but for the actual migration you don't Yeah, I see there's a whole thought process that has to uh occur before You actually hit the migrate button. It's not as easy as say take this here and put it over there Okay So so obviously those tools that tool that you just showed us obviously is you know, the discovery tool is is is built into Azure migrate. Um, yes, what other tools is that? You know, is there other tools there or is there even like third party tools that work along with it? Like is there any any other things you'd recommend? They they are other party tools. So if you've got like an example, uh A subscription or licenses for mover, which is a partner tool to migrate. Well instead of running VATS, uh, the the free tool then you can use partner tools So we are very partner centric at microsoft. Uh, we love our ecosystem And we encourage partners to build solution for For to help our customers or our joint customers to be successful So if you're familiar with one if you've used one of those applications before you can there are also sometimes, um Considerations that you want to take before you start migrating If you've got for example, and I had a customer like that that I talked to in brazil, um Not too too long ago where they were deploying everything on prem. Just pardon me. Do you have a samba server? No, they didn't have a samba server. They were all on windows server. So that was uh, but but I get the fun Yeah, um That's okay They already had a cicd pipeline to deploy their code to uh, those machines Yeah, so they said, okay. Well, we're looking at migrating the whole thing And then it became why why go through the process where you've already got The tools in place to deploy your applications properly and just We just have to branch that cicd pipeline and say also deploy instead of deploy on production Have another environment designed for pre-production and and target it to uh To vms in azure And then do your testing Replicate but then you can use azure migrate to replicate your your data or set it up in a way where Your data is going to be replicated in real time or near real time and then that becomes kind of like a disaster recovery Uh scenario because you now have an application that runs in both locations with the data that replicates in the background So you could say with azure front door in front say you go to the cloud, but if this one fails now go on prim Like they're there migrating vms is not just about the tools. It's a whole Way of thinking about what you have where you are and where you want to go and what is the most efficient and Business practical way of getting there so number one process and planning absolutely number two What would be number two? process planning number two inventory and and analysis number three replication or deployment depending on which of the scenarios that we've discussed number three testing that replication in sandbox number four planning the cut over to uh from on-prem to the cloud Because in a lot of cases There's going to be some manual. You can't they can't do everything automated Yeah, you can you can For example, if it if it's running a customer accessible Uh workload So people are coming from the outside. Well, you're gonna have to change your dns registration You're gonna have to change your your your name On the internet so that they now go to the new environment versus the old one So maybe you stop and in in the uh migration planning that in the tool you can actually insert A manual task where it will stop and wait for you to say yes. I have done it And once you've done that then it can automatically just shut down the on-prem environment It's still it's just shut down. So Something goes wrong. You can spin it back up and that's your your rollback Scenario because that's another thing that you have to consider at every part of the migration process is things will go wrong It's not a question of if it's a question of when So what is your plan for rollback if that part doesn't roll doesn't Work as expected. How do you roll back to the last known good? environment And then once migration is done your manual actions have been Created and the software or the the tools has shut down your on-prem basically tells the agent So yeah, I am migrated shut them down now gracefully Then you can either back them up Keep them as is for a while But you have to remember that the longer you keep them as is shut down the longer the delta between Whether data that's on one and the delta that's on the other So do you want to set up some kind of like still keep your server your sequel server? Running or your database whatever database you have and and have some kind of replication As I mentioned as I said Like I think The scenario what you just leave it is is like that is I mean that is not sensible I mean you've got to have some sort of replication going on there Yes at the very least just for a disaster recovery scenario. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely But now that you've migrated, let's say we've finished migrating the data and the Important right where where you're happy enough to Relax That's right But now the your your normal work Kicks in again because now you've got these machines that are not backed up So you have to set up backup you have to set up patching and automation and all of the regular Maintenance that you would do on them you have to figure out your your access policies Who's access to shut down that sort of machine start that machine log into that machine? Is that machine going to be available on the internet? And if so, did you did you create a firewall in front of it? Because that could be pre-created if not like you have to deal with that now all of the real it world Yeah management tasks they can they're different It's different tools and different methodologies that you do on prem But your skills as an it manager or or system administrator Now that's becomes critical because you have to apply all of these Normal operation things to your new environment Yeah There's gonna be more jobs. Let's just say that so lots of fun process It's all about the process. Well, um Thank you Roman for for digging into that. Um, and um You know, it's always I just love talking to you because it really gets me thinking about stuff Um, like you're definitely I'm gonna I don't want to upset all my other guests But you're definitely one of my favorites. Oh, well, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you Um, and yeah, we also we also talk about lovely holidays and food and stuff as well Which is great. Um, so Now, um, you know, we're gonna move on to that part of the show where we do the the mean review. Um, so, um You know, we're working on maybe something new for season three as well. So we'll see but season two It's still got the mean review. So, um, let's let's just let's just do that. This is where I get made. Look silly Roman looks smart or even smarter than he is And um, yeah, hopefully I'm not the I'm not a Thanksgiving turkey When when these memes come through so first meme Okay This is called data center to cloud migration I I see that that I'm reminded of another meme And the the it the it administrators sitting at the table going this is fine Yeah, because we're always fighting fires. So that's just another fire Yeah, that's true. It's it's just another fire at the end of the day and I mean, I think in some people's minds, that's probably how they see a cloud migration Oh, possibly I have to admit though, uh, I had a customer before, um in my last role at microsoft One of my customers which will remain nameless for um sake of protecting their identity Uh had a fire like that in their data center And it was have replication There was some replication, um No, no elsewhere, but uh, it's it's The thing is even with migration and with anything else when you're looking at disasters It's it takes a disaster to highlight the blind spots that you have in your environment Yeah, like for example in their case, uh, the blind spot is Their generators was connected to the same, um city grid For all of it. It's it's electronics. So even though there's a generator the electronics were connected to city grid So when the fire broke the first thing that the fireman did is cut the power to that That area which cut the power to the generator which actually turned off the generator So whatever else in that building was unaffected by the fire, uh crashed ungracefully Oh That was just mistake number one and we we could have another show Complete show on on fails and uh things that come up, but yeah, we should we should do We should do a fail show. I think that's uh, I think I think that that that would be interesting That's a good idea. That's a very good idea. Yeah, let's talk. Let's talk. Let's talk about It it fails. I think that's a really good You learn more about failures than you do about successes Yeah That's that's that's what my boss is always telling me Oh, my boss always told me it's okay to fail but fail fast learn and repeat Yeah, yeah, well not not repeat the failure, but not repeat the failure but repeat the repeat the attempt with Yeah, uh with the learnings taken into consideration. Yeah, absolutely. Right. Let's do meme number two I was thinking I was thinking about making a gesture, but I don't know if we can blur it in time So I knew this was coming. I knew this was coming. So oh man That is a old video That we did for introduction to azure fundamentals Need help with me and I do and I do remember that the day The night before we had other issues and we stayed up really late redoing a lot of the scripts and demos that we were building um and And this is the it's kind of like in any video if you take the right frame everybody looks like crap Yeah And somebody found that frame where I look like a zombie Do you know who found that? Can you guess who found that? Most likely, Anthony Bartolo Yeah You don't Anthony Anthony. I will find you And I will I will get you I'm like Liam Neeson on this one. I'm gonna go take in on you Oh That is the best meme Because I totally got that because I knew it was coming I was also like 30 30 pounds heavier and I had hair No, to be you look great now. So don't worry. Don't be silly like like you're like a fine wine You've actually got better with age, you know what I mean, right? So don't don't you worry about that I keep telling my wife that but she somehow doesn't believe it that well All right, is there another meme? No Sorry, sorry, we didn't mean to get you there. We didn't mean to get you That's okay. Those are all over the internet and I I owe them It's your silence your silence was absent for there was like a few split seconds of silence where you were like That's me That is that that used to be me Well, anyway, look, we'd love having you on the show. Thank you for being a good sport And letting us let us poke James at you. So we very much appreciate it. Um, good any time And Anthony, um, thank you, Anthony Good good shouts on that one. Um, so just let's summarize really quickly. Um obviously as you migrate it's A suite of tools that enables you To to figure out what you've got do the inventory figure out where you're gonna go Before you go crazy and do a migration, but it enables you to have the best view possible To get ready to do a migration in the best cleanest safest way possible. So Take advantage of our tools if if people want to find out more about this Is there a a good place to go much of docs or something like that? docs.microsoft.com and just look for azure migrate. Um, I'll uh, send you a link that we can put at the bottom and There's tons of documentation. There's tons of videos. I know, uh, sarah lean Our, uh, colleague had done a lot of presentations on it. There's some ignite sessions that I've done on On migration to the vm migration to the cloud There's tons of information out there and Oh, and there's also our discord server where if you have a specific question you can come and ask And I'll send you the link for that one as well Literally can't say fair enough. So rome. Thank you so much for your time Everybody, um, I think you'll agree. That was a great episode, especially that meme and that meme was a classic So, um, honestly, you'll find us on channel nine. You'll find us on youtube I will be posting this on linkedin youtube course. So if you've seen it on linkedin, thank you for clicking on it if there's anything you want to know which is server azure vm Any kind of any of this kind of stuff that you want to find out about if you want to do your own migration You got questions. Let us know and we will get it to an expert like pier and hopefully embarrass them on another show So thanks a lot for joining us today. Um, take care and