When migrating physical servers to Azure, what is a key consideration before starting the assessment?

Understanding server dependencies is crucial before migrating physical servers to Azure because it provides insight into how different applications, services, and workloads interact with one another. Each server may have dependencies on others—for example, some applications might rely on databases hosted on different servers or require specific services to be running on other servers.

Identifying these dependencies ensures that when you migrate, you can either move all dependent applications and services together or make necessary adjustments in Azure before and after the migration. This helps maintain application performance, functionality, and reliability in the new environment.

Other considerations, while important, may not have the same immediate impact on migration success. Assessing network bandwidth matters for understanding the speed of data transfer but does not address the operational and functional aspects of applications that depend on each other. Ensuring compatible operating systems is vital as well for avoiding issues post-migration but it is generally assumed that compatibility checks are conducted as part of the planning. Installing additional memory, while potentially helpful for performance, is usually an operational decision made after analyzing the resource requirements of applications rather than a pre-migration consideration.