Migrating to Azure

For migration, we recommend that you use the Azure Migrate service to migrate VMs and servers to Azure, rather than the Azure Site Recovery service. Learn more about Azure Migrate.

Why use Azure Migrate?

Using Azure Migrate for migration provides a number of advantages:

• Azure Migrate provides a centralized hub for discovery, assessment, and migration to Azure.
• Using Azure Migrate provides interoperability and future extensibility with Azure Migrate tools, other Azure services, and third-party tools.
• The Migration and modernization tool is purpose-built for server migration to Azure. It's optimized for migration. You don't need to learn about concepts and scenarios that aren't directly relevant to migration.
• There are no tool usage charges for migration for 180 days, from the time replication is started for a VM. This gives you time to complete migration. You only pay for the storage and network resources used in replication, and for compute charges consumed during test migrations.
• Azure Migrate supports all migration scenarios supported by Site Recovery. In addition, for VMware VMs, Azure Migrate provides an agentless migration option.
• We're prioritizing new migration features for the Migration and modernization tool only. These features aren't targeted for Site Recovery.

When to use Site Recovery?

Site Recovery should be used:

• For disaster recovery of on-premises machines to Azure.
• For disaster recovery of Azure VMs, between Azure regions.

Although we recommend using Azure Migrate to migrate on-premises servers to Azure, if you've already started your migration journey with Site Recovery, you can continue using it to complete your migration.

Next steps

Review common questions about Azure Migrate.