Azure Migrate is a great tool and great for migrating and modernising your datacentres. But more importantly it’s a discover and assessment tool that can help you plan your migrations.
The Azure migrate tool can run an assessment of your datacentre to see what servers, application and databases are compatible then we either additional tools or already built in tools help migrate you to Azure.
The 1st step in any migration is the discovery phase and Azure migrate does this and we will walk through these steps:
Your assessment will depend on what it is your planning to migrate to Azure, I’d always start big and select as much as possible in the assessment and you never know what may arise or surprise you.
Before we get started, we need to consider what of the 2 discover types we are going to use, Agent or agentless. Other than the obvious added effort of deploying agents to all servers there are a list of features that are different between the 2. Below is a table of those differences:
Agent | Agentless |
Available only Hyper-V & VMware appliance | Also available on Physical server |
Requires agents on Servers being assessed | Agentless |
Dependency Analysis | No Dependency Analysis |
Migrate Physical servers | Can’t migrate physical servers |
Migrate servers from AWS, Google cloud | Can’t migrate from other cloud providers |
Getting Started
To get started we need to create the Azure Migrate resource and a Project. A project can be a region, Location or just a select number of servers for an application.
1st step is we need to create a project:
- Select a subscription to use for hosting Azure Migrate.
- Create a new resource group.
- Create a project name.
- Select what region you want to use.
- If you’re in a secure environment you may want to use advance settings and change from public endpoint to private endpoint.
Once created you ‘ll be able to access the Azure Migrate resource in the Azure Portal. Here you will see 2 key areas:
Azure Migrate: discovery and assessment & Migration and modernization.
You must start with Discovery and assessment.
Click on discover. There are 2 options here discover using appliance or import using CSV.
We are going to use the appliance as this is best for starting from nothing and provide a more in-depth assessment. The CSV import only uses four mandatory fields to import: Server name, cores, memory, and operating system.
The Virtual Appliance has 3 options:
- VMware vSphere Hypervisor
- Hyper-V (SCVMM)
- Physical or other (AWS, GCP, XEN, etc…)
The key difference between these is that the VMware and Hyper-V version you download an image (OVA or VHD) to create a virtual appliance, the Physical version you download and install application to create the appliance.
For each of the option you will need to provide the name of the appliance which will allow you to generate a key which you’ll use to connect the appliance to this instance of Azure Migrate.
Then your ready to download, just decide which version you want to download the full image or zip file. Just be aware if downloading the zip file, you need to be able to unzip once downloaded before deploying.
Nice post! 1754812277