Azure Migrate is a Central hub where you can discover, assess, and migrate on-premises servers, apps, and data to the Microsoft Azure cloud. It’s a complete migration strategy to fully support your cloud journey. Let’s discuss Azure Migrate and its features as of today.
Azure Migrate – Unified Migration Platform
Azure Migrate is a Central hub for all the cloud migration activities, first, it will help the organization to understand and identify the migration scenarios, Azure migrator supports key migration scenarios across Servers, Data, Databases, Web Applications, and Virtual Desktops. Azure Migrate hub provides two free tools, Server assessment tool, and Server Migration tool. These tools will help to discover and assess on-premises VMware VM’s, Hyper-V VM’s physical servers. Also, to support Migrate VMware VMs, Hyper-V VMs, physical servers, as well as other virtualized machines, and public cloud VMs, to Azure.
Not only these two tools, but Azure migrator also supports and integrates with a number of ISV tools such as UnifyCloud and Rackware. According to the tool you use, you can directly use it on your on-premise environment or use the Server assessment tool to generate the output and feed into the ISV tools to generate more rich, presentable content plus migration dependencies.
With all these integrations, Azure Migrator provides a central view to all the migration stages, it will show the status of each scenario you plan and execute. So it’s called “Hub for all thing’s migration”
Key Migration scenarios
As of today, Azure Migrator GA with the following key scenarios.
- Windows and Linux - Discover, assess and migrate your on-premises VMware and Hyper-V virtual machines or Physical servers to Azure.
- SQL and other databases - Assess and migrate your on-premises databases to Azure SQL Database Managed Instance or Azure SQL Database.
- Databox – Migrate your data to Azure using the Databox storage device.
- Virtual Desktops – Asses your virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) for migration
- Web apps – Asses and migrate .Net web apps to Azure’s PasS or app service.
Azure Migrate: Server Assessment and Server Migration tools
Azure Migrate is a free service from Microsoft. With that Server assessment and Server migration tools comes as free. A server assessment tool is a lightweight appliance where you need to implement on your on-premise datacenter. it comes as VMware, Hyper-V and Physical appliances, you can download OVA file for VMware, VHD file for Hyper-V and Zipped folder with PowerShell scripts for Physical implementations.
Server Assessment tool discovers and assesses on-premises VMware VMs, Hyper-V VMs, and physical servers, for migration to Azure. It helps to identify the following information.
- Azure readiness
Assess whether on-premises machines are ready for migration to Azure. - Azure sizing
The estimated size of Azure VMs after migration. - Azure cost estimation
Estimated costs for running on-premises servers in Azure. - Dependency visualization
If you use Server Assessment with dependency visualization, you can effectively identify cross-server dependencies, and optimum ways to move dependent servers to Azure.
Server Assessment tool for VMware appliance requires 32GB Ram, 8-VCPU and around 80 GB of the hard disk. For Hyper-V and physical same configurations with much less Ram of 16GB. You can download it from following link
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/migrate/migrate-appliance
Server Migration tool helps to migrate on-premises VMware VMs, Hyper-V VMs, physical servers, other virtualized machines, and public cloud VMs to Azure. You can migrate machines after assessing them or migrate them without an assessment.
Azure Migrate | ISV tools
Azure Migrate hub supports a number of Independent software vendor tools to carry out the discovery and assessment process. However, these tools come with licensing costs. As of today, the following tools are supported.
- Carbonite
- Cloudamize
- Corent Technology
- Device 42
- Lakeside
- RackWare
- Turbonomic
- UnifyCloud
- Movere
Azure Migrator is continually developing and embracing new migration requirements. Migration scenarios are increased to address most of the platforms where azure migrator is becoming the Hub for all thing’s migration while addressing cloud migration strategies such as Rehost, Refactor, Rearchitect and Rebuild. From my next post, I will describe step by step on Implementing and executing the Azure Migrate Server assessment tool.
Hope this post is useful
Cheers
Asitha De Silva
References
Microsoft ignite 2019 sessions
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/migrate/migrate-appliance
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/migrate/migrate-services-overview#movere
