Best ways to migrate Azure VM to on-premise VMware

Question

I want to migrate all the VMs from Azure to on-premise VMware environment. Have been searching around the internet and roughly get some migration strategies from there:

1. Export VHD from Azure VM, import to Hyper-V as intermediate host, VMware vCenter converter to migrate from Hyper-V VM to VMware
2. Use Azure Site Recovery to replicate VM from Azure to VMware

For first option, I think it can be done. But how about the delta changes in source VM after our first VHD download? Because we have to import and test the VM first, but during this period there will be new data written to the Azure VM. So how should we deal with the delta data?

For second option which I've tried to study the article from MS but it mentions it's kind of like a failback scenario, can anyone confirm or have tried this migration before using Azure Site Recovery?

Answer 1

Hello Marcus Wong Theen Nam

Regarding your first question, after exporting the VHD from Azure VM and importing it to Hyper-V, any changes made to the original VM in Azure will not be included in the exported VHD as you know. Within ASR there isn't any workflow that supports the delta replication for a VHD download scenario.

If you need to test the VM before actually migrating it back to on-premises, you can pick a smaller size VM and to the import of VHD and test it once that goes well, you need to plan for a downtime of your azure production VMs and import their VHDs all over again.

There is a documented procedure on how to download a VHD from azure here https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/windows/download-vhd?tabs=azure-portal

Any user who wants to move out of Azure will follow this process. I found a good document on this topic here, please check, this would come handy for you https://techgenix.com/moving-azure-vm-on-premise/

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