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Discovery methods in Azure Migrate

This article explains the different discovery methods in Azure Migrate and gives guidance to choose the most suitable approach based on your requirements.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, make sure you create an Azure Migrate project by following the steps in Quickstart: Create an Azure Migrate project using portal.

Appliance-based discovery

The appliance-based discovery method involves deploying a virtual appliance that scans your environment to collect metadata about resources. This approach is ideal for scenarios where detailed, automated, and continuous discovery are required.

Key features

  • Continuous collection of configuration and performance data.
  • Supports discovering workloads such as SQL databases, webapps, and MySQL.
  • Discover software inventory and enable dependency analysis.

Guidance to choose the right appliance

VMware environments: For VMware-based infrastructures, we recommend to deploy VMware stack of Azure Migrate appliance. This appliance also supports agentless migrations.

Hyper-V environments: For Hyper-V environments, we recommend to deploy Hyper-V stack of Azure Migrate appliance. Also, download the Hyper-V replication provider to migrate Hyper-V servers.

Physical & public Cloud servers: To discover and assess physical servers and servers running in any public cloud, we recommend setting up a physical stack of appliance. To migrate physical servers, install a secondary replication appliance.

Import-based discovery

Import-based discovery is a simpler and faster alternative, relying on manual upload of inventory data in a structured format.

Key features

  • Manual data entry via CSV file uploads.
  • Add output inventory from CMDB tools to CSV templates.
  • Supports VMware inventory exported from RVTools XLSX file.
  • Build a quick business case using the servers discovered via import.

Supported workloads for discovery

Ensure that software inventory is enabled before initiating workload discovery. Azure Migrate supports the following workloads:

  • Discovery of SQL Server instances and databases.
  • Discovery of ASP.NET web apps.
  • Discovery of MySQL database instances.

Next steps