Intro

Azure Migrate helps you migrate to the Microsoft Azure cloud. The latest version of Azure Migrate provides a central hub to track discovery, assessment and migration of on-premises apps and workloads, and cloud VMs, to Azure. The hub provides Azure Migrate tools for assessment and migration, as well as third-party independent software vendor (ISV) offerings.

Documentation

• Azure Migrate

• Migrate VMware VMs to Azure (agentless)

• Migrate Hyper-V VMs to Azure

• Hyper-V VM Requirements For Migration

• Hyper-V to Azure disaster recovery architecture

• Prepare a Windows VHD or VHDX to upload to Azure

• Azure Migrate: Common questions

• Azure Migrate appliance

• Azure Migrate appliance: Common questions

Tips and Tidbits

•  Azure Migrate can assess both Hyper-V and VMware-based virtual machines, as well as physical servers.

• Azure Migrate also supports the visualization of dependencies for those machines.

  • It helps you create groups of machines that can be assessed together and ultimately migrated to Azure at the same time. 

• When you use Azure Migrate, the assessments it produces are created within a project that is set up in the Azure portal.

• You can discover and assess up to 35,000 servers in a single project.

• The Azure Migrate appliance can discover up to 5000 servers running on Hyper-V.

  • The appliance can connect to up to 300 Hyper-V hosts.

• Azure Migrate replicates up to 100 VMs simultaneously.

• Unified migration platform: Use a single portal to start, run, and track your migration journey to Azure, with an improved deployment flow and portal experience.

• Range of tools: Azure Migrate provides native tools, and integrates with other Azure services, as well as with independent software vendor ISV tools. 

• Azure Migrate Server Assessment: Assess VMware VMs and Hyper-V VMs for migration to Azure

• Azure Migrate Server Migration: Migrate on-premises VMware VMs and Hyper-V VMs to Azure, as well as physical servers, other virtualized servers, and private/public cloud VMs

• Database assessment/migration: Assess on-premises databases for migration to Azure,

• Azure Migrate appliance: Azure Migrate deploys a lightweight appliance for discovery and assessment of on-premises VMware VMs and Hyper-V VMs.

  • This appliance is used by Azure Migrate Server Assessment, and Azure Migrate Server Migration for agentless migration and

  • continuously discovers server metadata and performance data, for the purposes of assessment and migration.

  • Azure Migrate appliance requirements

• VMware VM migration: Azure Migrate Server Migration provides a couple of methods for migrating on-premises VMware VMs to Azure.

  • An agentless migration using the Azure Migrate appliance, and an agent-based migration that uses a replication appliance, and deploys an agent on each VM you want to migrate.

• Web app migration: You can assess web apps using a public endpoint URL with the Azure App Service. For migration of internal .NET apps, you can download and run the App Service Migration Assistant.

• Data Box: Import large amounts offline data into Azure using Azure Data Box in Azure Migrate

• The Azure Migrate appliance is a lightweight appliance that the Azure Migrate: Discovery and assessment tool uses to discover and assess physical or virtual servers from on-premises or any cloud.

• The appliance is deployed on-premises as a physical server or a virtualized server.

• The appliance discovers on-premises servers and continually sends server metadata and performance data to Azure Migrate.

• Appliance discovery is agentless. Nothing is installed on discovered servers.

• The appliance communicates with Windows servers over WinRM port 5985 (HTTP) with Linux servers over port 22 (TCP).

  • It collects metadata from Windows servers using Common Information Model (CIM) session.

  • Windows Remote Management (WinRM) is the Microsoft implementation of WS-Management Protocol, a standard Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)-based, firewall-friendly protocol that allows hardware and operating systems, from different vendors, to interoperate.

  • The metadata collected from the servers can be found here.

Open

• If your company wants details about how the VMs are related to each other (via a visualization of dependencies), you can install agents to collect that data.

  • Azure Migrate will prompt you to install the Microsoft Monitoring Agent and Dependency Agent on each VM

Plan your Azure migration

• Azure migration framework

• Use a framework of Assess, Migrate, Optimize, and Monitor as a path for migration

Open

•  Identify the servers, applications, and services that are in scope for migration.

• Produce a full inventory and dependency map of servers and services that are in scope for migration.

  • The inventory and map determine how those services communicate with each other.

  •  

• For each application, there are multiple migration options:

  • Rehost: Recreate your existing infrastructure in Azure.

  • Refactor: Move services running on virtual machines to platform-as-a-service (PaaS) services. 

  • Rearchitect: You might be forced to rearchitect some systems so that they can be migrated.

  • Rebuild: You might need to rebuild software if the cost to rearchitect it is more than that of starting from scratch

  • Replace: Evaluate software-as-a-service (SaaS) options that can be used to replace existing applications.
    
    

• After you complete the initial scoping exercise, use the Azure Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator to estimate the real costs
  
  

Hyper-V Requirements

• Hyper-V VM Requirements For Migration

  • Support matrix for Hyper-V assessment

• Operating system disk size: Up to 2,048 GB for generation 1 VMs. Up to 300 GB for generation 2 VMs

• Data disk VHD size: Up to 4,095 GB

• BitLocker must be disabled before you enable replication for a VM.

Migrating VMs from On-Prem To Azure

• Migrate Hyper-V VMs to Azure

• Download and install the Hyper-V Replication Provider on each cluster (not in each VM).

  • Note that the Azure Migrate appliance isn't used for Hyper-V migration (but it is used for discovering servers).

• Replicate each VM to Azure (you select VM sizes and other configuration here).

• Run a test migration. Temporary Azure VMs are created with the replacated data from above.

• Migrate the VMs and complete the migration. Original VMs are shutdown.

VMware Migration

See: Select a VMware migration option

• Agentless replication: Migrate VMs without needing to install anything on them.

  • A maximum of 500 VMs can be simultaneously replicated from a vCenter Server.

  • A VM that you want to migrate must have 60 or fewer disks

• Agent based replication: Install an agent on the VM for replication.

• Max OS disk: 2 TB Data disk: 32 TB

• BitLocker must be disabled before you enable replication for a VM.

Migrating VMs from On-Prem To Azure

• Download and install OVA appliance in VMware.

• Configure and register the OVA appliance with the Azure Migrate project.

• Connect appliance to VMWare vCenter server.

Assessment and Migration Tools

Prepare a Windows VHD or VHDX to upload to Azure

Detail steps here for preparing a Windows Hyper-V or VMWare disk to be uploaded to Azure.

• Prepare a Windows VHD or VHDX to upload to Azure