Move Azure Machine Learning workspaces between subscriptions (preview)

Article
06/12/2023

As the requirements of your machine learning application change, you may need to move your workspace to a different Azure subscription. For example, you may need to move the workspace in the following situations:

Promote workspace from test subscription to production subscription.
Change the design and architecture of your application.
Move workspace to a subscription with more available quota.
Move workspace to a subscription with different cost center.

Moving the workspace enables you to migrate the workspace and its contents as a single, automated step. The following table describes the workspace contents that are moved:

Workspace contents	Moved with workspace
Datastores	Yes
Datasets	No
Experiment jobs	Yes
Environments	Yes
Models and other assets stored in the workspace	Yes
Compute resources	No
Endpoints	No

Important

Workspace move is currently in public preview. This preview is provided without a service level agreement, and it's not recommended for production workloads. Certain features might not be supported or might have constrained capabilities.
For more information, see Supplemental Terms of Use for Microsoft Azure Previews.

Prerequisites

An Azure Machine Learning workspace in the source subscription. For more information, see Create workspace resources.
You must have permissions to manage resources in both source and target subscriptions. For example, Contributor or Owner role at the subscription level. For more information on roles, see Azure roles.
- You need permissions to delete resources from the source location.
- You need permissions to create resources in the destination location.
- Thee move mustn't violate Azure Policies in the destination location.
- Any role assignments to the source workspace scope aren't moved; you must recreate them in the destination.

The destination subscription must be registered for required resource providers. The following table contains a list of the resource providers required by Azure Machine Learning:

Resource provider	Why it's needed
Microsoft.MachineLearningServices	Creating the Azure Machine Learning workspace.
Microsoft.Storage	Azure Storage Account is used as the default storage for the workspace.
Microsoft.ContainerRegistry	Azure Container Registry is used by the workspace to build Docker images.
Microsoft.KeyVault	Azure Key Vault is used by the workspace to store secrets.
Microsoft.Notebooks/NotebookProxies	Integrated notebooks on Azure Machine Learning compute instance.
Microsoft.ContainerService	If you plan on deploying trained models to Azure Kubernetes Services.

If you plan on using a customer-managed key with Azure Machine Learning, then the following service providers must be registered:

Resource provider	Why it's needed
Microsoft.DocumentDB/databaseAccounts	Azure Cosmos DB instance that logs metadata for the workspace.
Microsoft.Search/searchServices	Azure Search provides indexing capabilities for the workspace.

For information on registering resource providers, see Resolve errors for resource provider registration.

The Azure CLI.

Tip

The move operation does not use the Azure CLI extension for machine learning.

Supported scenarios

Automated workspace move across resource groups or subscriptions within the same region. For more information, see Moving resources to a new resource group or subscription.

Note

The workspace must be quiescent before the move; computes are deleted, no live endpoints or running experiments.
Moving a workspace that has private endpoints configured is supported. The private endpoints are disconnected and transitive private endpoints are recreated after the move. However, you're responsible for approving the new private endpoints (including the workspace private endpoint) after the move.

Limitations

Workspace move isn't meant for replicating workspaces, or moving individual assets such as models or datasets from one workspace to another.
Workspace move doesn't support migration across Azure regions.
Workspace move doesn't support migration across Microsoft Entra tenants.

Tip

For information on manually moving tenants, see the Transfer an Azure subscription to a different Microsoft Entra ID article.
The workspace mustn't be in use during the move operation. Verify that all experiment jobs, data profiling jobs, and labeling projects have completed. Also verify that inference endpoints aren't being invoked.
The workspace becomes unavailable during the move.
Before to the move, you must delete or detach computes and inference endpoints from the workspace.
Datastores may still show the old subscription information after the move. For steps to manually update the datastores, see Scenario: Move a workspace with nondefault datastores.

The following scenarios are not supported:

Workspace with computes (either existing computes or in the process of creating the compute).
Workspace with deployed services.
Workspace with online endpoints/deployments.
Workspace configured for customer managed-key.
Workspace with currently running labeling projects.
Workspace linked with Azure Databricks.
Workspace move across regions.

Prepare and validate the move

In Azure CLI, set the subscription to that of your origin workspace
```
az account set -s origin-sub-id
```
Verify that the origin workspace isn't being used. Check that any experiment jobs, data profiling jobs, or labeling projects have completed. Also verify that inferencing endpoints aren't being invoked.
Delete or detach any computes from the workspace, and delete any inferencing endpoints. Moving computes and endpoints isn't supported. Also note that the workspace becomes unavailable during the move.
Create a destination resource group in the new subscription. This resource group will contain the workspace after the move. The destination must be in the same region as the origin.
```
az group create -g destination-rg -l my-region --subscription destination-sub-id                  
```
The following command demonstrates how to validate the move operation for workspace. You can include associated resources such as storage account, container registry, key vault, and application insights into the move by adding them to the resources list. The validation may take several minutes. In this command, origin-rg is the origin resource group, while destination-rg is the destination. The subscription IDs are origin-sub-id and destination-sub-id, while the workspace is origin-workspace-name:
```
az resource invoke-action --action validateMoveResources --ids "/subscriptions/origin-sub-id/resourceGroups/origin-rg" --request-body "{  \"resources\": [\"/subscriptions/origin-sub-id/resourceGroups/origin-rg/providers/Microsoft.MachineLearningServices/workspaces/origin-workspace-name\"],\"targetResourceGroup\":\"/subscriptions/destination-sub-id/resourceGroups/destination-rg\" }"
```

Move the workspace

Once the validation has succeeded, move the workspace. You may also include any associated resources into move operation by adding them to the ids parameter. This operation may take several minutes.

az resource move --destination-group destination-rg --destination-subscription-id destination-sub-id --ids "/subscriptions/origin-sub-id/resourceGroups/origin-rg/providers/Microsoft.MachineLearningServices/workspaces/origin-workspace-name"

After the move has completed, recreate any computes and redeploy any web service endpoints at the new location.

Scenario: Move a workspace with nondefault datastores

The automated workspace move operation doesn't move nondefault datastores. Use the following steps to manually update the data store credentials after the move.

Within Azure Machine Learning studio, select Data and then select a nondefault data store. For each nondefault data store, check if the Subscription ID and Resource group name fields are empty. If they are, select Update authentication.

In the Update datastore credentials dialog, select the subscription ID and resource group name that the storage account was moved to and then select Save.
If the Subscription ID and Resource group name fields are populated for the nondefault data assets, and refer to the subscription ID and resource group prior to the move, use the following steps:
1. Navigate to the Datastores tab, select the datastore, and then select Unregister.
2. Select Create to create a new datastore.
3. From the Create datastore dialog, use the same name, type, etc. as the datastore you unregistered. Select the subscription ID and storage account from the new location. Finally, select Create to create the new datastore registration.