Quick Note — Evaluate On-Premises Servers, Data, and Applications for Migration
AZ-305 › Unit 4: Design infrastructure solutions › Design migrations › Evaluate on-premises servers, data, and applications for migration
Quick Note — Evaluate On-Premises Servers, Data, and Applications for Migration
A large international retail bank in Frankfurt starts its Azure migration confidently. The team picks ten "obvious" lift-and-shift candidates from a spreadsheet of 800 VMs and migrates the first one. It comes up fine in Azure but a downstream payment system breaks immediately — nobody knew the migrated VM was its database. Two weeks of firefighting later, the team realises the spreadsheet was last updated 30 months ago, and roughly 40% of the entries are either wrong, missing, or pointing to decommissioned hardware. They reset the plan, deploy the Azure Migrate appliance, and let it discover and dependency-map the estate over the next 30 days.…
Retrieval target
- Evaluate On-Premises Servers, Data, and Applications for Migration
- Closed-book recall
- 5 minutes
- Open the full lesson after a miss
Decision anchors
| Prompt | Compact answer |
|---|---|
Azure Migrate Hub | A central portal for discovering, assessing, and migrating workloads to Azure. Hosts multiple tools under one project: Server Assessment, Server Migration, Database Migration, Web App migration assistant, Data Box for offline data shipping. First-party and free; partner tools (Carbonite, Movere) also surface here. |
Azure Migrate appliance (Collector) | A lightweight Windows VM you deploy in the on-prem (or another cloud) network that performs agentless discovery: connects to vCenter / Hyper-V Manager / physical servers and inventories their config, performance, and disk metadata. Sends the data outbound (HTTPS) to Azure Migrate. The data plane behind 'click Discover' in the Migrate Hub portal. |
| Agentless vs Agent-based discovery | Agentless dependency analysis (recommended for new projects) — the Azure Migrate appliance gathers TCP connection and process data without installing guest agents. The enhanced experience automatically analyzes eligible discovered servers and supports application grouping.… |
Azure Migrate Assessment | A scoped analysis run that produces a readiness verdict + right-sized recommendation + cost estimate per server. Inputs: assessment criteria (Azure VM target, AVS, App Service), pricing tier (PAYG / 3-year RI), AHB toggle, sizing mode (Performance-based or As-on-prem). Output: per-server PDF / CSV with recommended VM size, monthly cost, and any migration blockers (unsupported OS / boot type). |
Read the answers once, then cover the right-hand column and reconstruct each one from the prompt. A useful answer names the requirement, the recommended control or service boundary, and the nearest alternative it rejects. If you can only recognize the answer after seeing it, retrieval is not yet secure.
Ninety-second explanation
Without notes, explain:
- What requirement signals this learning objective rather than a neighbouring one?
- Which two solution families are most likely to be compared?
- Which hard constraint eliminates the strongest distractor?
- What identity, network, data, or failure boundary must appear in the design?
- Which operational test would prove the recommendation works?
Then compare your explanation with the full lesson. Record the missing decision rule—not merely the missed product name—in your error log.
When to open the full lesson
Open the curriculum-linked lesson when you cannot explain a comparison, when a scenario depends on a numeric limit or SKU feature, or when the service is on a retirement path. Use current Microsoft Learn documentation for availability, limits, pricing, naming, and migration milestones; the quick note is intentionally compact.
Source and freshness
Derived from the linked AZ-305 lesson and retrieval deck, grounded in both attached course sources. Reviewed 2026-08-02. Current Microsoft documentation controls changing product contracts.