Oceana Group Azure
PoC Migration

 

Migration of 2 on-premises applications, limited to an application having a maximum of 3 servers and migrated as a lift and shift. As part of the feasibility study from Oceana with regards to the migration to Azure, it was imperative that one of these applications included the use of on-premises SQL server(s) so that Oceana could evaluate network, application usage and latency from Azure to its on-premises users.

 

Project Background

The Oceana Group is a global fishing and food processing company with a strong, experienced management team, and businesses that operate across the full value-chain which includes catching or procuring, processing, distributing, and selling.

It is Africa’s largest fishing company with a history dating back over 105 years. It has been listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) for over 75 years, as well as being listed on the Namibian (NSX) and A2X stock exchanges. Oceana has nearly 4 000 employees based across South Africa, Namibia, and the United States. The Group operates 54 vessels and 8 production facilities across three countries on two continents, selling products to customers in 41 countries.

Mint was approached by Microsoft to help Oceana with Phase I of their Azure Migration.

 

What problem were you trying to solve or what opportunity were you trying to capitalize on?

The client wanted to explore the feasibility of moving their on-premises infrastructure to the Azure cloud and begin with their cloud adoption journey. The big driver for this was costs, administrative overhead hosting workloads on-premisses vs. hosting workloads in Azure. A complete Azure Landing zone(s) was designed for Production, Development and QA this was implemented by Mint leveraging Azure Blueprints.

 

What problem were you trying to solve or what opportunity were you trying to capitalize on?

The client wanted to explore the feasibility of moving their on-premises infrastructure to the Azure cloud and begin with their cloud adoption journey. The big driver for this was costs, administrative overhead hosting workloads on-premisses vs. hosting workloads in Azure. A complete Azure Landing zone(s) was designed for Production, Development and QA this was implemented by Mint leveraging Azure Blueprints.

Challenges

• Understanding the current environment and inter-dependencies of each system.
• Permissions on the clients VMWare environment.
• Required a Domain Controller in Azure (Additional Requirement).
• Site-to-Site Connectivity (Additional Requirement).

Solutions Implemented

Mint Group addressed the specific challenges understanding the current environment and dependencies by leveraging the Azure Migrate tooling that forms part off Azure Migrate (Azure native tooling). Microsoft documentation was used in order to assist the client with the configuration and required pre-requisites to deploy the Azure Migrate OVA Template on the clients vSphere (VMware)

  • Technical Workshops were done with the clients IT team to deploy and configure the Azure Migrate OVA template.
  • Mint performed an assessment of 186 servers leveraging Azure Migrate.
  • As the assessment data became available, Mint had multiple workshop sessions with the client to go through the assessment data.
  • This allowed Mint and the client to understand the current landscape better. The assessment provided valuable data such as servers, dependencies, Azure Migrate readiness and Application dependencies.

Mint assisted the client to deploy a working Domain Controller in Azure extending the on-premises network to Azure leveraging Azure Virtual Network Gateway with Site-to-Site and Point-to-Site connectivity. This piece of work was required for a successful Migration Proof of Execution (POE).

Results

  • Successfully assessed 186 servers.
  • Designed and built Azure Landing Zones required for Migration that including:
    • Migration Landing Zone
    • Production Landing Zone
    • Development Landing Zone
    • QA Landing Zone
  • Deployed a fully working Domain Controller (DC) to the Azure Cloud.
  • Extended the clients on-premises network to Azure, leveraging Azure Virtual Network Gateway.
  • Replicated and migrated an on-premises SQL Server to the Azure Cloud.

Testing was successfully completed on the migrated server.

Lessons Learnt

Consider the “small things” in the overall big picture of the project. For example, Mint had to deploy an additional domain controller and establish site-to-site connectivity in order to do perform a successful migration and to evaluate the migrated server. Both the Oceana and the Mint team were exceptional in getting Phase 1 over the line, within the agreed timelines.

Next Steps

This project showed that Mint is fully capable to assess a customer environment leveraging the toolset that Microsoft provides through Azure Migrate.
The Mint team is highly skilled when it comes to Azure Infrastructure and building out the Landing Zones (Required Supporting Infrastructure such as Virtual Networks, Network Security Groups, Servers and Connectivity) and then ultimately migrating the on-premises servers to the Microsoft Azure Cloud.
The next steps would be to execute Phase 2, migrating the remaining on-premises servers to Azure using a phased/staggered approach.

The team

Claire Gibson                Coastal Account Manager
Christo Greeff               Specialist Consultant
Philipp Krapf                  Senior Project Manager
Mohamed Osman      Head of MSP
Junaid Essop                 Channel Program Lead
Keith Williams              Senior Azure Engineer
Adeola Adeyeye          Senior Azure Engineer