Hi, welcome to this course on deploying and migrating an SAP landscape to Azure. While the migration strategy course focused on the "what to do" of migration and the Design an Azure Infrastructure for SAP looked at the components required for an SAP system, this course looks at the "how to do." That is methods for deploying and implementing the infrastructure design. If you haven't already viewed the migration strategy and the infrastructure design courses, I would highly recommend having a look before taking this course. This course does assume some familiarity with cloud, virtual machine, and networking concepts. I also expect you have used the Azure portal to some extent and are familiar with basic Azure features like the Azure CLI and PowerShell.

My name is Hallam Webber, and I'll be your instructor for this course. We welcome all comments and feedback, so please feel free to reach out to us at support@cloudacademy.com with any questions or comments. Let's get started.

As there is quite a bit of ground to cover, I want to start with an overview of the topics we will be looking at. Before we can deploy to Azure, we need to know what we are going to deploy in terms of infrastructure. As we are migrating from an existing landscape, whether that is on-premise or from a data center, we can use the size of our current setup as the starting point for determining the size of our target environment. Once we know what our target environment will look like, then we will need a robust and repeatable way to deploy the infrastructure. To this end, we will see how Azure resource manager templates can help us. SAP landscapes are complex, often incorporating high availability and redundancy, making networking an integral and vital aspect of the structure. In the case of migration, networking takes on an added importance due to the large amount of data transferred to the target environment. Once the target VMs and networks are in place, then it is a case of performing the migration. We will look at the various tools that can aid us with migrating application and database servers. 

Apart from the nature and size of the required infrastructure resources, there are a few key concepts we need to address that are specific to the cloud environment. First and foremost, except for bare metal servers, we will be talking about infrastructure as code. This means using declarative functionality to specify infrastructure resources so that those resources can be deployed consistently and repeatably. If you are unfamiliar with infrastructure as code, this means virtual hardware, like virtual machines, storage, and networks, can be provisioned and scaled up or down within a matter of minutes. Besides virtual hardware options, you can specify the installation of various operating systems and deploy your infrastructure resources to different data centers and geographic locations to aid with system redundancy and disaster recovery. In addition to infrastructure, you can also define governance policies in a similar declarative fashion.