Customer Background
The customer is a renowned healthcare technology company in North America. Over the years, the company has provided software solutions to a lineup of hospitals, clinics, research centers and other medical institutions.
Business Requirement
As the business underwent significant expansion, the customer wanted to reduce the maintenance hassle and focus on core processes. They approached Apple Consulting Group (ACG) for a secure migration of their legacy system data to Azure cloud.
Roadmap
In compliance with the Azure Lift & Shift Migration process, the business system were thoroughly studies before architecting the landscape in the new environment. Following is a broader layout of the phased approach at pursuing the migration in a secure and seamless manner.
Strategy & Planning
This is the actual phase of requirement gathering and scoping the solution. Given the unpredictable peak load in the legacy system, the Azure SQL Elastic Pools were used to absorb the varying load. These pools worked perfectly for the customer system as they are crafted for 5 databases.
Migrate
Lift & Shift was handpicked as the migration strategy for the project as it performs quick migration of objects in the new system. Diligently following the Azure migration guide, the ACG team used Azure Site Recovery (ASR 3) to test the system’s sturdiness in an event of failure.
Monitor
As the new subscription for Azure is provisioned, relevant user roles are created. Furthermore, end-to-end operation management of cloud operations are governed with hyper care.
Implementation
A provisioned database was pre-allocated a fixed amount of compute resources, including CPU and memory. Going forward, the following pre-requisites from the customer were required.
- Owner access on Azure Subscription
- Setting up the Configuration server
- S2S VPN connectivity between Azure & VMware infrastructure
The deployment activity was divided into 3 phases –
Phase 1 – VM Replication
The Recovery Service Vault (RSV) from Azure is configured followed by registering the configuration server. Using Azure Site Recovery, 9 VMs were successfully migrated without any downtimes. The customer took over the control to perform VHD files upload before deployment.
Phase 2 – Test Failover
After the VHD files were successfully uploaded by the customer’s team, ACG teams proceeded with deployment of 9 VMs. Based on the inputs from the customer; the Test Failover of the first batch of the VMs was scheduled in an isolated Virtual Network.
Phase 3 – Final Failover
Based on the remarks and official confirmation from the customer’s data team, the final Failover on the production network was successfully performed.
Post Implementation Benefits
⮚ Reduced maintenance overhead of the infrastructure
⮚ Better compliance with mobility
⮚ Optimal user experience and faster content delivery
⮚ Uninterrupted processing with no down times