An organization should first identify and assess all on-premises services that can be classified as an infrastructure service.

During the assessment, an analysis should be performed that includes the health, scale and configuration as an example to determine if the existing infrastructure service can support workloads running in a VMware Cloud SDDC. If an existing infrastructure service is deemed insufficient, then an organization should strongly consider rearchitecting the service or replacing it with a cloud-native service.

Upon completing the assessment, an organization can determine whether a given service should be replaced with a cloud-native service, assuming a feasible alternative exists. Common services such as DHCP and DNS are generally available in all infrastructure service providers, other services must be evaluated based on its utilization, criticality, and cost as an example to determine the best available option.

There are many tools and methodologies for cataloging and assessing your existing environment. Internal documentation can provide an initial understanding of how existing infrastructure services are configured and managed. Monitoring can be another source of information, especially if they are monitoring the utilization and health of specific infrastructure services (e.g., the number of DNS queries per second). With the availability of metrics, an organization can appropriately forecast infrastructure service utilization and cost.

NetFlow data can also provide insights into the different protocols running within an organization’s network. Example traffic types can include DNS, DHCP, NTP, Syslog, authentication, and client/server communication. NetFlow data can also be used to understand application and service dependency mapping, which will assist in migrating workloads to a VMware Cloud SDDC.

Note:

VMware Aria Operations for Networks can be used to analyze network traffic to help understand the different types of applications and/or services running within an organizations network.