Enterprise Application Migration To Azure

The Azure cloud is moving fast in so many areas. Understandably, migration tools that can assist and automate the process of migrating applications to Azure are of great importance in order to encourage a move away from existing infrastructure.

Two such tools that I’ve discovered recently are the Web Apps Migration Assistant, which is detailed here, and the Data Migration Assistant, detailed here.

The Web Apps Migration Assistant will analyse your hosted IIS (and even Linux) web apps, and can migrate them (if compatible) to the Azure App Service as Web Apps.

The Data Migration Assistant targets SQL Servers and analyses them for migration to Azure SQL Database. This tool does not perform the migration, instead it highlights the incompatibilities that exist and suggests remedial action, this could include preparing fixes as Transact-SQL scripts. Tools such as SSMS or SQLPackage.exe can be used to migrate the database to Azure, a good overview of this process is here and a deeper discussion of the process is mentioned in this SQL CAT blog. Of course, you may want to determine if your database is even suitable for running in Azure and tools exist such as this one to help size the database prior to migration.

These two tools could help fast-track your move to the cloud, and whilst some effort will still be required, they remove much of the manual effort that was previously required in shifting your applications and databases to Azure.

Running SQL Server 2016 Express in an Azure VM

While working through the provisioning guide for SQL Server in Azure VMs I hit a problem.

I chose the 2016 Express Edition, followed all the steps to create a server that was available publicly and then attempted to connect using the SQL server extension for Visual Studio 2015.

Try as I might, I couldn't connect, getting back this error:

Cannot connect to xyz.eastus.cloudapp.azure.com

A network-related or instance-specific error occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server. The server was not found or was not accessible. Verify that the instance name is correct and that SQL Server is configured to allow remote connections. (provider: Named Pipes Provider, error: 40 - Could not open a connection to SQL Server) (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 53 The network path was not found

Eventually I discovered that the problem is not due to the VM firewalls, Azure NSGs or SQL Server configuration. Instead I loaded up Sql Server Configuration Manager and checked the enabled protocols, only shared memory was enabled, so I enabled both the Named Pipes and TCP/IP Protocols as follows:

Finally, success! I was able to connect to my SQL server instance over the internet.