In last month's blog I touched on the Azure programs that are available through Dicker Data and Microsoft, for this month’s blog I thought it would be useful to expand on one of these programs that can really help you and your customers get started on their Azure journey and lay the foundations for utilizing the other programs that are available, this being the Azure Express Solution Assessment.

In a nutshell, the Azure Express Solution Assessment is a free agile economic assessment, it helps you to get started on your journey to Azure with a fast, comprehensive, data-driven analysis of server estates. The assessment provides meaningful insights into your customers’ environments, allowing you and your customers to understand what Azure workloads to migrate to, define costs, set out a migration plan and help you prepare for next steps.

A key part of the insights as I see it, is helping yourselves and customers understand the costs of running environments in Azure, as well as some of the technical and business merits of doing so along with helping to determine a migration plan with your customer. These deliverables can save you and your engineers a lot of time, and as part of this you also get access to the Azure Migration Assessment Workbook which the Solution Assessment team at Microsoft uses.

 

 

What are the steps to request and carry out a Solution Assessment?

  • Collect customer data (RV Tools of Azure Migrate – further details on this below)
  • Fill out our form to request an Azure Express Solution Assessment
  • The Solution Assessment team will ask you to upload the customer data
  • Once the report is ready, the Solution Assessment team sets up a call with yourself to run through the findings and the assessment
  • Finally, you setup a call with your customer to discuss the results and potential migration, with the option to present with Microsoft (this can be useful in the first few assessments)

 

 

There is a 5-day SLA between nominating a customer and the Solution Assessment team sending over the instructions (5 days is usually the maximum that it would take, it usually takes one or two days). Once Microsoft get the data to actually prepare the report, that usually only takes about 72 hours or quicker, so end to end these assessments can be very quick, especially if you’re using RV Tools, Azure Migrate does take a little bit longer because the recommendation is that it’s run for a week or so to get good performance data into the report.

This is an Azure assessment, so the scope covers powered-on systems with a Windows Server and/or Linux Server Operating system, there is some qualification criteria:

  • Minimum 5 powered-on Windows Servers and/or Linux Servers (what’s migrated can be less)
  • Have an active interest and intent to migrate server workloads to Azure
  • An in-house resource is required with the ability to collect data either using RV Tools or Azure Migrate (instructions provided)
  • Have the customer data ready or be ready to commence data collection activities within 48 hours of registration
  • This in-house resource will need to attend the pre-customer briefing with Microsoft and present this back to the customer (or attend the call where it is presented back along-side Microsoft if this is the preference)

In terms of collecting the data, there are two options:

RV Tools:

  • This is for VMware environments only
  • Azure VM sizing suggestions are based on point in time as-is data
  • Takes around 5 minutes to deploy and 5 minutes to collect the data
  • SQL server data is not included in RV Tools but can be provided manually
  • This is the fastest data collection method with minimal work required

Azure Migrate:

  • Includes analysis of VMware, Hyper-V, and standalone server environments
  • Azure VM sizing suggestions are based on performance data
  • Takes around 1 hour to deploy and another hour to configure
  • Recommendation is to collect performance data scans for a period of 2-4 weeks, the longer it’s run the more accurate the performance data is (minimum is 1 week)
  • SQL server data is collected natively
  • Takes longer than RV Tools but as it’s a performance-based assessment it is typically the most accurate around Azure VM sizing suggestions (a key benefit is that Azure Migrate can also deliver on the migration to Azure)

 

I mentioned at the start that as part of doing an Azure Express Solution Assessment you get access to the Azure Migration Assessment Workbook, which is an interactive Excel workbook that serves as both a powerful Azure IaaS economic assessment tool and an Azure migration roadmap planner. It provides a single-pane-of-glass view of the customer environment and its inventory/performance data along with a comprehensive set of results and insights delivered via a built-in and fully automated Assessment Report.

This workbook is designed to be used post assessment by yourself to further refine and develop a migration strategy.

 

 

After doing an Azure Express Solution Assessment, this is where you can utilize the other programs that I touched on in the last blog to do a Proof of Concept with the customer or get started on the migration, the options pre-dominantly being:

  • The Dicker Data Proof of Concept program
  • Utilizing funding from Microsoft via our Azure Migrate and Modernize certified provider (non-compete service provider) to deliver the migration
  • Utilize Microsoft’s CSU Migration Factory team to deliver the migration

The Solution Assessment team have prepared an on-demand training video, so if you’d like to discover more about what I’ve touched on here and see a demo then you can check it out here.

You can sign-up here to request an Azure Express Solution Assessment.

 

As always, if you’d like to discuss this or anything else Azure related, then please reach out to myself or anyone else in the Azure team here at Dicker Data.