Azure Migrate is a service that helps you decide, plan, and execute your migration to Azure. Azure Migrate helps you find the best migration path, assess for Azure readiness and cost of hosting workloads on Azure, and perform the migration with minimal downtime and risk. Azure Migrate provides support for servers, databases, web apps, virtual desktops, and large-scale offline migration using databox.
What is Azure Migrate?
Azure Migrate provides a simplified migration, modernization, and optimization service for customers who are looking at migrating their on-premises workloads to Azure. This tool provides you with a one stop solution to discover, generate business case, assess, right-size, and eventually migrate your infrastructure, data, and web application workloads. A general migration journey includes the following phases:
Decide: The first step in a migration journey is to identify your workloads. This process of identification is known as discovery. To discover your workloads, you can deploy a light-weight Azure Migrate appliance (recommended approach) or quickly import the inventory data for your workloads. The Azure Migrate appliance is a virtual appliance that can be deployed on a server on your datacenter. The appliance collects the configuration and performance data for your servers and continually sends it over to Azure Migrate Service. Once the inventory of workloads is identified, you can create a business case to make your decision to migrate to Azure.
Business case helps you decide if you should migrate your on-premises workloads to Azure, by estimating the costs and savings of moving to Azure. The business case helps you identify-
On-premises vs Azure total cost of ownership
YoY comparison of cash flows
Resource utilization-based insights on Azure targets.
Long-term cost reduction by switching from a capital expenditure (Capex) model to an Operating expenditure (Opex) model. Learn more about business case.
Plan: Once the decision is made to migrate to Azure, the next important phase is planning of migration. To plan migration in detail you can assess your discovered workloads using Azure Migrate assessments to find the readiness, right-sized targets, configuration of the target Azure resources, cost of hosting target resources on Azure, and migration guidance.
Azure readiness: Assesses whether on-premises servers, SQL Servers, and web apps are ready for migration to Azure.
Rightsizing: Estimates the size of Azure VMs/Azure SQL configuration/number of Azure VMware Solution nodes after migration.
Azure cost estimation: Estimates costs for running on-premises servers in Azure.
Dependency Analysis: Dependency analysis helps you understand the network dependencies between servers in your datacenter so that you can make high confidence migration plans without missing any critical dependency during migration. Learn more about dependency analysis.
Execute: In this phase, you perform the migration or modernization of your workloads to move to Azure. You can use the Azure Migrate service or partner tools to migrate your servers, databases, web apps, or virtual desktops with minimal downtime and risk. You can migrate the following workloads using the integrated migration tool.
Migrate
Details
On-premises VMware VMs
Migrate VMs to Azure using agentless or agent-based migration.
For agentless migration, the Migration and modernization tool uses the same appliance, used for discovery and assessment of servers.
For agent-based migration, the Migration and modernization tool uses a replication appliance.
On-premises Hyper-V VMs
Migrate VMs to Azure.
The Migration and modernization tool uses provider agents installed on Hyper-V host for the migration.
On-premises physical servers or servers hosted on other clouds
You can migrate physical servers to Azure. You can also migrate other virtualized servers, and VMs from other public clouds, by treating them as physical servers for the purpose of migration. The Migration and modernization tool uses a replication appliance for the migration.
Web apps hosted on Windows OS in a VMware environment
You can perform agentless migration of ASP.NET web apps at-scale to Azure App Service using Azure Migrate.
Azure Migrate provides support for end-to-end migration of your workloads to Azure at each phase mentioned above.
Why use Azure Migrate?
Azure Migrate offers multiple benefits for your cloud migration journey, such as:
Unified migration platform: A single portal to start, run, and track your migration to Azure. The unified platform supports discovery, assessment, and migration of variety of workloads like servers, databases, and Web applications.
Free tool: Azure Migrate is a free self-service tool that you can use to identify your inventory of workloads, assess them for multiple IaaS and PaaS Azure targets, develop plan for their migration, and finally migrate them using in-product, first-party, and partner migration tools (Partner tools might charge you for using their services).
Range of tools: Azure Migrate has tools for assessment and migration which includes Azure Migrate: Discovery and assessment and Migration and modernization.
Assessment, migration, and modernization: In the Azure Migrate hub, you can assess, migrate, and modernize:
Servers, databases and web apps: Assess on-premises servers including web apps and SQL Server instances and migrate them to Azure.
Databases: Assess on-premises SQL Server instances and databases to migrate them to an SQL Server on an Azure VM or an Azure SQL Managed Instance or to an Azure SQL Database.
Web applications: Assess on-premises web applications and migrate them to Azure App Service and Azure Kubernetes Service.
Data: Migrate large amounts of data to Azure quickly and cost-effectively using Azure Data Box products.
Integrated tools
Azure Migrate has a suite of the following tools integrated within the product:
Tool
Assess and migrate
Details
Azure Migrate: Discovery and assessment
Discover and assess servers including SQL and web apps
Discover and assess on-premises servers running on VMware, Hyper-V, and physical servers in preparation for migration to Azure.
Migration and modernization
Migrate servers
Migrate VMware VMs, Hyper-V VMs, physical servers, other virtualized servers, and public cloud VMs to Azure.
Data Migration Assistant
Assess SQL Server databases for migration to Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Managed Instance, or Azure VMs running SQL Server.
Data Migration Assistant is a stand-alone tool to assess SQL Servers. It helps pinpoint potential problems blocking migration. It finds unsupported features, new features that can benefit you after migration, and the right path for database migration. Learn more.
Azure Database Migration Service
Migrate on-premises databases to Azure VMs running SQL Server, Azure SQL Database, or SQL Managed Instances
The Virtual machine and app migration using Azure Migrate learning path gives you a step-by-step process to help you understand, set up, assess, and migrate virtual and physical servers, databases, applications, and virtual desktops from on-premises to the Azure infrastructure. Azure Migrate now includes fully integrated and optimized migration-specific tools previously available only in Azure Site Recovery.