Microsoft has announced the General Availability (GA) of continuous migration assessments for SQL Server enabled by Azure Arc. With this, the Redmond giant aims to make it easier for organizations to migrate SQL Server workloads to Azure. One of the main improvements that Microsoft has made is to reimagine assessment experience which can help address common migration questions and challenges.
As a bit of background, Azure Arc brings Azure’s cloud management and governance capabilities to servers outside of Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform. Specific setups that benefit from Arc include on-premises servers, other cloud providers, edge environments, and Kubernetes clusters. Essentially, Azure Arc allows you to manage these external resources centrally through the Azure portal as if they were native Azure resources.
Microsoft has noted that planning a migration can be daunting, especially with all the comparing of costs across multiple scenarios. It said that previously, entering pricing data manually for each option was error-prone and repetitive. With this GA, all of this is done for you and you can compare costs in just a few clicks.
With the new assessment experience, organizations will have direct access to the retail pricing for all Azure Savings Options, including SQL Azure Hybrid Benefit (AHB), Windows AHB, Reserved Instances, and Azure Savings Plans. The assessment experience covers multiple Azure SQL destinations including Azure SQL Database (DB), Azure SQL Managed Instance (MI), and SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machine (VM).
Users will be shown a detailed cost breakdown by compute and storage with prices for the West US region in USD used for consistent comparison. When you adjust the assessment settings, the costs will quickly change to reflect your choices as savings have already been precomputed.
Aside from easier pricing, Microsoft now shows you a selected migration strategy with multiple product offerings. To reduce any confusion between the choices, Microsoft goes a step further and highlights which it thinks is the best option with a Recommended tag. These updates should make migrations easier for organizations, but don"t hesitate to give Microsoft your feedback.