Have you ever stared a 30TB server and wondered what could go wrong during the cutover?

A migration of 30TB to Azure from a file server is not the same as a smaller migration. A failed migration of this scale will affect every user, application, and business process that relies on the data. The stakes were real business operations.

The outcome was decided in the pre-migration phase. The Azure Migration runbook I designed before moving a single byte defined the sequencing logic and bandwidth throttling. It also outlined the cutover window structure. The execution team would not have been able to make these decisions under pressure in real-time without this document.

The scheduling decisions were more important than the tool selection. We had to take into account the data change rate, the application dependency mapping of workloads reading from the server, and the minimum feasible cutover window.

A 5-person Hyper Care Support Team managed latent issues for 500+ clients in multiple post-migration phases. The runbook provided a common triage approach for the team, rather than a different approach each time a new problem surfaced.

Ad-hoc migrations of this scale do not fail at the execution date. They fail weeks before when nobody had written down what would happen in the event of a problem.

What does your premigration runbook cover, that your tooling alone cannot handle?

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