Overview of Redington’s Windows Specialization:

Deploy or migrate you Windows workload on AWS with scalable and secure EC2 deployments paired with Redington’s Windows workloads and Migration capabilities.

Along with subscription licenses from AWS, enjoy the support and benefits of BYOL (Bring Your Own License). Choose from multiple deployment options for Windows on EC2 based on tenancy and workloads.

 

• Tenancy
  – Shared Instances
  – Dedicated Instances
  – Dedicated Hosts
• Workloads
  – Windows Server only.
  – Windows Server with SQL Server.

 
Reach out to the Redington team to analyse and get an assessment done for your current infrastructure to provide you with our Migration Readiness Assessment of your Windows workloads. Redington Limited being an Advanced Consulting Partner for AWS, have worked on migrating and modernizing Windows Server to AWS.

 

Challenge faced by KMV:

KMV faced the following challenges with their existing application design and deployment architecture. This was their setup prior to migration to the new AWS setup with Windows Server (2012) and SQL server (2012) on EC2.

 

• Single Tier Architecture with Application and Database running on the same Windows server.
• Web Tier and Domain controller running on the same Windows server.
• Heavy Impact to Application Performance due to the above and their monitoring revealed throughput issues.

 

Solution Overview:

Before diving into the solution overview, let us understand the services prominent in the solution.

 
Amazon EC2 running Microsoft Windows Server (2003 R2, 2008, 2008 R2, 2012 and 2012 R2, 2016 and 2019) is a secure, reliable, and high-performance environment for deploying Windows-based applications and workloads. You can provision instances quickly, and scale up or scale down as you need it, while only paying for what you use. Amazon EC2 supports a self-managed SQL Server database. That is, it gives you full control over the setup of the infrastructure and the database environment. Running the database on Amazon EC2 is very similar to running the database on your own server. You have full control of the database and operating system-level access, so you can use your choice of tools to manage the operating system, database software, patches, data replication, backup, and restoration.

 
AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) is a managed migration and replication service that helps move your database and analytics workloads to AWS quickly, securely, and with minimal downtime and zero data loss. AWS DMS supports migration between 20-plus database and analytics engines.

 
A VPC is a virtual network that closely resembles a traditional network that you’d operate in your own data center. After you create a VPC, you can add subnets. The VPC is also bundled with NAT Gateway which is a Network Address Translation (NAT) service. You can use a NAT gateway so that instances in a private subnet can connect to services outside your VPC, but external services cannot initiate a connection with those instances. A major component is also the VPN Connectivity. AWS Virtual Private Network (AWS VPN) establishes a secure and private tunnel from your network or device to the AWS Cloud. You can extend your existing on-premises network into a VPC or connect to other AWS resources from a client. AWS VPN offers two types of private connectivity that feature the high availability and robust security necessary for your data.

 
The proposed solution is a Greenfield Deployment for the application with database migration also in scope. The customer had been running Microsoft workloads from a single server. The solution proposed that these be hosted on multiple EC2 instances thus eliminating the persisting performance issues. Utilizing the flexible options for Licensing of Windows and SQL server available in AWS, KMVPL saved on the Licensing cost and the Total Cost of Ownership.

 
Migration Methodology
Redington followed the R-Lane Migration strategy for migrating the Windows workload to AWS. For this migration the approach was as follows:

 

• Fresh Application Installation
• SQL Database Migration

 
To ensure high availability of the Production database, a secondary database has been added in a secondary availability zone and both databases are in synchronous replication. The second database also serves as a data origin for the user’s Analytics platform. All user traffic is routed via a site-to-site tunnel and NAT Gateway is used for accessing the application and Database respectively.

 

Deployment:

For the Greenfield scope of the project, the above architecture was followed to deploy the complete infrastructure in a phased manner to prioritize on the critical workloads first.

The VPC and associated services like the Security Group, route tables, Site-to-site tunnels from customer locations were setup on AWS.

For the migration scope of the project, EC2 with Windows Server and SQL Server were launched and configured as required prior to initiating the migration.

 

• Setup VPN Tunnels between source and AWS and customer office and AWS.
• Configure database migration using AWS Database Migration Service
• Configure data migration using AWS Datasync.

 

Setup of Amazon EC2 with Windows Server and SQL Server roles and follow up actions including:
 

• Hardening the OS
• Application of patches.

 

Configured monitoring services using CloudWatch and CloudTrail.

 

Benefits

KMVPL migrated their windows workload to AWS EC2 instances to cater to their Windows Server requirement, their SQL Server requirement and also their Active Directory needs using the flexible options provided for EC2 on the lines of deployment and licensing options. A few more benefits realised with this migration are as follows:

 
Three Tier Architecture
Moving from a single tier architecture to a three-tier architecture hosted on EC2 with Windows server for applications and Amazon EC2 with Windows Server and SQL Server for the Database helped with the application performance and throughput issues.

 
Ease of Deployment & Integrations
The EC2 AMI is bundled with the SQL License reduced the deployment timelines for the Database servers. Also, as the application is running with SQL Server on Windows, the integration with PowerBI with database for analytics was configured with ease.

 
Active Directory
Promoting the Windows EC2 server to Domain controller provided a way to have the native functionality of windows server to have an Active directory with minimal cost and to server as an ADC in cloud. The ADC is used for authentication and authorization of users to the applications.

 

Summary

Redington can help you not only migrate but also modernize your Windows workloads with AWS.

Our cloud experts help you along in your transformation journey right from the assessment of your landscape to be migrated to designing and delivering the solution that is unique to your requirements.