Defining Azure VM Requirements

There are two typical scenarios for deploying Azure VMs:

• Migrating existing physical or virtual servers from on-premises or other hosted data centers, sometimes referred to as “lift and shift”
• Creating entirely new workloads running on newly deployed Azure VMs.

When migrating from existing servers, organizations might find it worthwhile to benchmark the performance of their existing servers prior to evaluating Azure services to determine a baseline for their workload running on Azure VMs. The Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit is an agentless, automated, multiproduct planning and assessment tool that can analyze the existing deployment of servers and help define the requirements needed to virtualize that deployment in Azure VMs. When migrating a VMware-based workload, the Azure Migrate service can discover and assess VMware VMs for potential migration to Azure and provide VM sizing and cost estimates that could be useful in early migration planning.

For entirely new VM workloads, organizations need to perform capacity planning and testing of their workload, understand the intent of the available VM series, and select and test a VM size before putting a workload into production. Moving from one series to another can present challenges, but Azure VMs can be resized up or down within a series relatively easily, provided the system can handle individual VMs being unavailable while they are resized. This constraint makes it important to select a VM size within a series that leaves room to resize should the workload need to be rebalanced.