Highlights
~300 virtual machines migrated to cloud
~250 virtual machines decommissioned
~50 TB of application data migrated
Impact
Capex avoidance of around $10 Million
70% reduction in overall operational costs
80% reduction in carbon emission footprint
Organizational readiness for modernization initiatives
Issue
A global agricultural company wanted to migrate its on-premises workloads to cloud. Transpire team of experts led the discovery, analysis and migration phases for the client to successfully deliver fast paced migrations to Azure.
Solution
Discovery of on-premises infrastructure was conducted where existing workloads were identified as lift and shift, modernization, retention or decommission candidates.
In order to accelerate the cloud migration, initial migration was done to Azure VMware Solution (AVS) but later on most migrations were done directly to Azure.
Cloud Landing Zone (CLZ) was architected and implemented for both AVS and Azure Native solutions. Active Directory, Backup, Firewall, Load Balancers and storage solutions were designed and implemented as a part of the cloud landing zone.
Migrations to AVS were done using HCX and Azure Native were done using Azure Migrate.
A couple of modernization candidates were identified during migration and deployments to PaaS solutions such as App Service and SQL DBaaS were also completed successfully.
Lessons Learnt
Cloud migration projects is a huge change in any organization and comes with a cultural drag.
A huge number of servers in the digital estate were found to be an overhead and were decommissioned instead. Transpire team of experts have seen similar trend among other migration projects.
Azure VMware Solution (AVS) has its pros and cons as compared to Azure Native, but in order to accelerate migration to cloud, this proved to be essential part of the journey.
Azure VMware Solution is available in only a subset of regions and can cause complexities related to high availability, disaster recovery and latency.
There are often legacy applications which can only be supported to run on hardware or VMware based virtualization. These workloads can be easily lifted and shifted to Azure VMware Solution (AVS) without worrying about the business applications supportability on cloud.
Often DB servers are shared between multiple applications and can cause proximity issues when lifting and shifting. These require special consideration and planning.
SQL high availability clusters often need special attention since these can be deployed to Azure and AVS using different methodologies.
Cost optimization needs to be properly planned and catered for before and during migrations. Often there are rightsizing opportunities which can be leveraged.
Application related file shares need special attention since these often contain sensitive content and migration to cloud involves storage planning and a proper migration methodology and tools to aid migration velocity.
