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Options to migrate VM workloads to Azure Local

Applies to: Azure Local 2503 and later

This article provides an overview of the options available for migrating virtual machine (VM) workloads to your Azure Local instance.

Migration options

To migrate VM workloads and their data to your Azure Local instance, several options are available. These options are classified either as first-party or third-party. Select the option that best suits your current infrastructure and migration goals.

First-party migration options

First-party migration options are provided by Microsoft. These options are built into the Azure Local platform and are available to you at no additional cost.

Azure Migrate

The primary first-party migration option is Azure Migrate, which is available on systems running Azure Local. Azure Migrate is a central hub for tools to discover, assess, and migrate on-premises servers, apps, and data to the Microsoft Azure cloud.

You can use Azure Migrate to migrate the following types of VMs to Azure Local:

Considerations for Azure Migrate

Azure Migrate requires both a source appliance in your on-premises environment and a target appliance in your Azure Local instance. This setup is necessary for every Azure Migrate project. For more information, see Source VMware requirements and Source Hyper-V requirements.

  • Hyper-V migrations: Support is currently in preview.
  • VMware migrations: Azure Migrate doesn't provide VDDK packages, and access to them might be restricted. If a supported VDDK package isn't available to your organization, use a third-party migration option.

By default, Azure Migrate provisions all migrated VMs as Azure Local VMs enabled by Azure Arc. For more information on VM types for Azure Local, see Types of VMs on Azure Local.

If your source VMs are already onboarded as Azure Arc-enabled servers, you can retain their existing Azure Arc resources during migration instead of projecting new ones. For more information, see Reuse Azure Arc-enabled server resources when you migrate VMs to Azure Local.

Third-party migration options

The following third-party migration options are offered by Microsoft partners.

Next steps

To learn more about migration using Azure Migrate, see:

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