- Client
- Multi-site enterprise
- Sector
- Enterprise
- Services
- Azure Migration, Discovery & Assessment
- Year
- 2025
- Timeline
- Assessment recovery
- Read time
- 5 min read
57
Servers inventoried across both sites
11
Hosts brought into one defensible dataset
7
Faulted inventory entries resolved
01 · The challenge
What we walked into
The client's move to Azure began with an assessment that never finished. Across two sites, the Azure Migrate appliance could not complete its discovery. Collection stalled, inventory entries arrived faulted, and the work stopped without a dataset anyone could plan a migration against.
The estate sat behind self-signed certificates, a third-party firewall between sites, and tightly held vCenter credentials, so the path through was to resolve each blocker in turn rather than simply re-running the appliance.
02 · Our approach
How we got there
- 01
Diagnose the stall
We established why the previous attempt had stopped, separating appliance configuration, certificate trust, network reachability, and credential handling so each blocker had an owner and an order.
Blockers first
- 02
Re-establish trust
Self-signed certificates on the hosts were dealt with explicitly, vCenter permissions were granted to a dedicated collection account, and the paths the appliance needed through the third-party firewall were opened and verified.
Access work
- 03
Restart and babysit collection
We restarted discovery and stayed with it through a full utilisation window, monitoring collection daily and resolving faulted entries as they appeared. A partial inventory would not have been good enough.
30-day window
- 04
Deliver the dataset
The finished assessment covered every server across both sites with utilisation data, dependency hints, and a clear view of what would need attention before migration, including how few workloads were on a supported operating system for the simplest migration paths.
Handover
03 · The outcome
What changed
A migration programme that had started with an unfinished assessment ended with a complete, evidence-based picture of the estate and a sequenced plan for moving it. The client could see what it owned, what it used, and what would need fixing before anything moved.
Complete inventory
57 servers, 11 hosts, 257 vCores, around 1 TB of memory, and 89 TB of storage captured in one dataset the client could plan against.
Costs grounded in reality
Right-sized recommendations replaced list-price assumptions, with utilisation data showing what the estate needs rather than what list-price sizing had assumed.
Risk surfaced early
Unsupported operating systems, aging hosts, and hidden dependencies were all visible before any migration wave was planned, with time to do something about each one.
Technologies
- Azure Migrate
- Azure Redis
- vCenter Server
- ESXi
A note on confidentiality
Much of our work takes place in regulated and security-sensitive sectors, where the details of a client's environment are confidential by default. In line with our commitments to those clients, identifying details in this case study have been anonymised or generalised, while the work, the decisions, and the outcomes are described as delivered.
If you would like to know more about this engagement, we are happy to discuss it further and can share additional information on request.