So, Microsoft just announced the v2 of Azure Migrate. You can read about some of the improvements and enhancements here.

You may be all excited to try out the new features, but, what if you don’t have a spare VMware or Hyper-V server just laying around? Not to worry! You can easily try and experience the end-to-end process of designing a migration strategy for on-premises environments to Azure, including the migration of virtual and physical servers as well as databases.

“But how?” you may ask. Allow me to introduce you to the wonderful world of the Microsoft Cloud Workshops.

Microsoft Cloud Workshop (MCW)

The Microsoft Cloud Workshop (MCW) is a hands-on community development experience, which contains customer-ready content to host workshops that foster cloud learning and adoption. You can even contribute your own content, and create your own Cloud Workshop to share with others.

You can find the site here: https://microsoftcloudworkshop.com/

If you filter the list to ‘Azure Infrastructure’ and scroll down the list a little, you will see a wWorkshop entitled “Line-of-business application migration“. This is the workshop that will allow you to experience all that Azure Migrate has to offer.

There are some pre-lab setup steps required, but in essence, there is a deployment template that will deploy a Virtual Machine running nested Hyper-V, with 4 nested VMs to simulate the ‘on-premises’ environment for the lab!

Note that the deployment of the nested Hyper-V VM and its sub-nested VMs will take a bit of time to deploy/configure (ie. about an hour according to the lab guide). But once it’s up and running, you can follow the extensive step-by-step lab, which will give you hands-on experience with discovery and assessment of the on-premises environment, migration of an application database, and finally, utilizing Azure Site Recovery to migrate the web and application tiers.

Update

When you go through the Line-of-Business Application Migration Workshop, you may notice that some of the steps, outputs, screenshots, etc. don’t match what we see in the Azure portal today.

I have spoken to the team that is responsible for the workshop guide (Opsgility), and have been informed that they are already hard at work on producing an updated version of the guide to better align with the latest Azure portal experiences.

Conclusion

This is a great way to get an environment up and running quickly in order to gain some valuable hands-on experience with the Azure Migrate product. It’s also useful if you want to prepare a demo for clients as well!

Now you too can be an #AzureMigratePro!

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