With the help of Failover and Hyper-V, we helped our customer move their existing applications and services to Azure. The move to the cloud provided improved security and scalability opportunities.
Our customer, a global ,growing, chemicals-distribution company in chemicals that handles large amounts of data, faced the challenge of managing its data securely and efficiently.
Their current infrastructure was no longer scalable and the customer saw the need to migrate their data to the cloud to have greater flexibility and capacity to scale as needed.
They came to us at Agdiwo with the desire to use Failover and Hyper-V to move their existing applications and services to Azure. They also wanted an operating system and network configuration as close to their current on-premise configuration as possible in the cloud.
We started a comprehensive upgrade of their server environment and began by upgrading the operating system on 10 of their servers to Windows Server 2016/2019 as far as possible. Then we moved 29 of their servers to Azure, to give them a more flexible and scalable infrastructure. (See image for a flowchart of migration at Agdiwo)
We also investigated the possibility of consolidating several server roles on the same server and upgrading the operating system on an additional 5 servers.
A crucial objective was to move their SQL databases to a SQL Server Always On availability group in Azure. We accomplished this by disconnecting the databases from the old servers and connecting them to the new server.
To ensure a stable and redundant domain structure, we also installed two new DC servers on Azure and moved the AD FSMO roles to the new server. Then we decommissioned the old domain controllers on their datacenter.
The customer also had the need to move their Skype environment to the cloud. To improve their communication, we installed two new Front-End Skype for Business on Azure and a new Edge Skype for Business Server 2015 on Azure. We migrated all users to the new Skype for Business pool and decommissioned the old Skype for Business.
Throughout the process, we documented all steps to ensure that the customer had a clear overview of all changes and configurations.
It was a comprehensive and developmental assignment that we in the team at Agdiwo and good cooperation with the customer solved together.
Our customer now stands with a cloud service with better performance and flexibility, and an operating system and network configuration as close to their current on-prem configuration as possible.
They can meet their growing needs and focus on their business activities rather than managing technical challenges. They emerged from the project with increased security, scalability opportunities, and lower hardware and maintenance costs.
