Welcome to the next stage of your VMware to Azure migration journey. In this part of the guide, you’ll complete server dependency mapping.
Overiew of Dependency Mapping
Servers have dependencies in production and real-world environments. For example, an application server may depend on a database server.
Furthermore, a server may require some firewall ports to be opened to communicate with other servers.
The Azure Migrate dependency analysis identifies discovered on-premises servers and their inter-dependencies. After running your dependency analysis and mapping, you can plan your migration by:
- Identify servers that you must migrate together
- Modify your Azure assessment groups to improve migration success
- Determine servers that must be decommissioned because they’re not in use.
Dependency analysis helps you plan your migration and reduce surprise service outages. Azure Migrate supports two types of dependency analysis: agentless and agent-based.
In this guide, I will explain how to perform agentless dependency mapping.
Task 1: Perform Agentless Dependency Mapping
Agentless dependency analysis supports VMware, Hyper-V, and servers running on public clouds like AWS and GCP. The steps below explain how to complete agentless dependency analysis on VMware discovered VMs:
- On the Servers, databases and web apps > Azure Migrate: Discovery and assessment page, click the Dependency analysis drop-down and choose Add servers.
- On the Dependency analysis – Add servers page, only discovered servers that have been validated as ready for migration will be available. Check all the servers on which you want to run dependency analysis, then click Add servers.
Task 2: View Server Dependencies
- Once the previous task is completed, expand Manage, then click the Discovered servers menu. To display a server’s dependencies, click View dependencies.
- The last action will display the server’s dependincy mapping. The dependincy mapping for my domain controller shows that 6 clients are connected to the server.
To view the clients, click the arrow next to the node.
Furthermore, the mapping shows that there are 15 processes running on the DC and 6 ports that apps and other servers use to connect to the server.
To view the detailed dependency mapping for the server, click on it to expand it. The screenshot below shows that there is 1 Inbound Connection and 6 Outbound Connections.
However, there is no other machine that depends on this VM to function.
Task 3: Refine Grouping Based on Dependency Analysis
Based on the dependency mapping you performed in Task 2, refine the group you created earlier.
To add or remove servers from a group:
- Click the number beneath Groups
- Then, click on a group’s name and finally, click Add machines or Remove machines.
After completing dependency mapping for all the VMware workloads you intend to migrate, it is time to migrate the VMs to Azure. For the steps, proceed to part 4 of this guide.