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Overview of Azure Migrate based migration for Azure Stack HCI (preview)

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Applies to: Azure Stack HCI, version 23H2

This article provides an overview of how to migrate Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs) to your Azure Stack HCI cluster using Azure Migrate.

Azure Migrate is a central hub for tools to discover, assess, and migrate on-premises servers, apps, and data to the Microsoft Azure cloud. Azure Stack HCI is a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) cluster solution that hosts virtualized Windows and Linux workloads in a hybrid environment. You can use the Azure Migrate platform to move on-premises Hyper-V VMs to your Azure Stack HCI cluster.

For more information on the Azure Migrate platform, see About Azure Migrate.

Important

This feature is currently in PREVIEW. See the Supplemental Terms of Use for Microsoft Azure Previews for legal terms that apply to Azure features that are in beta, preview, or otherwise not yet released into general availability.

Benefits

Here are the benefits of using Azure Migrate to migrate your on-premises VMs to Azure Stack HCI. This solution:

  • Requires no preparation for your source VMs including installation of agents prior to migration.
  • Provides the control plane via the Azure portal. You can use the portal to start, run, and track your migration to Azure.
  • Keeps the data flow local, from on-premises Hyper-V to Azure Stack HCI.
  • Results in a minimal downtime for the VMs running on your on-premises servers.

Migration components

With Azure Migrate, you can choose to migrate your data from your on-premises Hyper-V environment to Azure or to your on-premises Azure Stack HCI cluster.

The following diagram shows the migration process to your on-premises Azure Stack HCI cluster:

Diagram that shows a high-level workflow for migration using Azure Migrate.

The migration process requires the following components:

  • An Azure Migrate project. Both the source and target appliances need to be registered with this project.
  • Azure Migrate appliance running on your on-premises source Hyper-V servers. The source servers host the VMs that you want to migrate.
  • Target appliance running on your on-premises Azure Stack HCI cluster. The target cluster hosts the VMs that you migrated from your source Hyper-V environment.

Note

The Azure Migrate project is used to discover the source VMs and replicate them to the target Azure Stack HCI cluster. The associated Azure Storage account serves as a cache to store the metadata and the replication data.

Migration phases

Here are the key phases of the migration process:

# Phase Description
1. Prepare Prepare to migrate by completing the migration prerequisites. Deploy, configure, and register your Azure Stack HCI cluster. This cluster is the migration target. Create an Azure Migrate project and an Azure Storage account in Azure.

For more information, see Review prerequisites for Azure Migrate.
2. Discover Create and configure an Azure Migrate source appliance. Use this appliance to discover your on-premises source Hyper-V servers.

For more information, see Discover Hyper-V VMs.
3. Replicate Create and configure the target appliance on your Azure Stack HCI. Select and replicate the VMs that were discovered in the previous step.

For more information, see Replicate Hyper-V VMs.
4. Migrate, verify Once the replication is complete, select and migrate VMs to your Azure Stack HCI. After the migration is complete, verify that the VMs have booted successfully and the data has migrated properly. You can now pause the replication and decommission the source VMs.

For more information, see Migrate and verify Hyper-V VMs.

Next steps

To prepare for migration, see the following articles: