A crucial part of a successful migration is collecting business and technical requirements, allowing you to properly design a cloud platform. For guidance, review Preparing for VMware Cloud on AWS before beginning your requirements gathering.

Business requirements are an important part of the requirements gathering process. Input examples include:

• RTO/RPO targets

• Business SLAs for the applications workloads based on SQL Server databases

• Licensing considerations

• Security and data-management considerations

Technical requirements will directly influence logical design and should be collected and validated with care. Pay special attention to the following bullet points:

• Performance requirements of the workload (e.g., transactions-per-second, number of user connections, expected future workloads changes)

• Capacity requirements (e.g., future growth, other projects to be served)

• Manageability requirements (e.g., providing access to a SDDC to appropriate user groups, reconfiguring monitoring tools, backup solution in use, modifying scripting, vRealize Operations workflows)

• Scalability requirements (e.g., method for increasing capacity of a SDDC, scale-out versus scale-in approach)

• Availability requirements (e.g., SQL Server high-availability solutions in use, DRS groups, host-isolation response, number of availability zones required)

• Application requirements (e.g., type of workloads [e.g., OLTP/data warehouse], dependencies between on-premises components and network flow between them)