Lift-and-shift on-premises workloads to Microsoft Azure just made a lot easier with Azure Migrate Service, which Microsoft released in preview during Microsoft Ignite event back in September this year. Azure Migrate gives you the advice and confidence that your workloads could be migrated to Azure IaaS with minimal impact to the business!

Before this feature came out, I’d personally always used Azure Site Recovery (ASR) as migration method to the Microsoft Azure Cloud. ASR is officially built as Disaster Recovery solution to replicate on-premises servers, wherever it’s Hyper-V, VMware or physical servers, to Azure IaaS (Infrastructure-As-a-Service). Therefore, now instead of using it for Disaster outage / scenarios, you also could use it to perform an actual failover to Azure IaaS and then afterwards stay in Azure without performing a failback back to on-premises!

Take away the small complexities makes migrations to the Cloud just as easy as 1-2-3 without any downtime for the business (if you perform the right steps) … With Azure Site Recovery as migration method, you also have the possibility to test your workload first before going live in a test Virtual Network completely separate from production.

Furthermore, Microsoft also created a cost calculator and dependencies feature integrated in the Migration Service in the form of an assessment. Where you can see what the costs will be in Azure and which sequence is the best approach to follow, think about startup sequences for example. Although I’m not advise you to migrate your complete workload to IaaS for the long time. Azure has a lot more Cloud Services which can replace Windows Server features, to eventually save a lot of monthly costs, with services such as Azure AD Domain Servers, Azure Storage Spaces Direct and Azure SQL Databases instead of a “Do-it-Yourself” SQL in IaaS.

In this article, I’ll walk you through all the installation and configuration steps of the new Azure Migrate Service to eventually perform a lift-and-shift for on-premises VMware workloads to Microsoft Azure.

Note: As mentioned in the above section, the Azure Service is currently in PREVIEW mode and since this week also publicly available through the Azure Marketplace! No need to get approved anymore.

Table of Contents

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Did you know?

Azure Migrate is available at no additional charge. However, during public preview, additional charges will apply for use of dependency visualization capabilities. These charges will be incurred as part of the Insight and Analytics offering. Note: When the service becomes generally available, there will be no charge for use of dependency visualization capabilities.

It provides a Built-in Cost Calculation program, which makes it easy to create and Total-Costs-of-Ownership of running your machines in Azure Infrastructure-As-a-Service (IaaS)?

The power behind the Migrate service are the Azure Site Recovery and Database Migration Service, therefore now only with the goal to migrate to the Azure Cloud instead of Site-to-Site replication for Disaster Recovery Scenario’s?

You can easily Discovery and create assessments to migrate to Azure for on-premises virtual machines, wherever it is Hyper-V, VMware or Physical?

Is supports built dependency mappings for high-confidence discovery of multi-tier applications, such as Exchange and Microsoft SQL.

It provides an intelligent rightsizing to Azure virtual machines, which gives advices on the SKU / machine sizing in Azure, compare to the on-premises resource configuration.

The Migrate Service has a built-in compatibility reporting with guidelines for remediating potential issues, which can save you a lot of work before you start migrating?

Integration with Azure Database Management Service for database discovery and migration

Azure doesn’t support unified boot or also known as PXE. If you’re on-premise machine boots through a network streaming configuration for example, then it couldn’t be migrated to Microsoft Azure.

How does it work?

Start your free Azure account, or log in to your existing Azure Business account

First add the Migrate Service from the Azure Marketplace

Import the appliance in VMware vCenter Server to create the collector virtual machine.

Discover and assess your on-premises environment using Azure Migrate

Copy project credentials and place them in the Collector Appliance

Migrate you’re on-premises workloads using services like Azure Site Recovery and Azure Database Migration Service

Running in Azure!

Cost Calculation Assessment Dashboards

The Migration service has some great out-of-the-box tools available to perform a costs inventory of running your on-premise workload in Microsoft Azure. This rapport is easy to use as proof for your IT Manager that the Azure Cloud is affordable enough for a production environment.

It also gives advice on which machine is now ready for Azure or not!

Azure Migrate provides also the possibility to export the information to an Excel Sheet, which eventually looks like the picture below.

VMware to Azure migration: TCO guidance

Microsoft Azure provides a frictionless / seamless approach for moving VMware to Azure with the lowest Total Costs of Ownership possible.

From the Azure docs website “Gain from economies of scale, use tools to optimize resource utilization, and take advantage of flexible compute options in Azure. Save even more with offers like Azure Reserved VM Instances and Azure Hybrid Benefit (for Windows Server workloads), all while taking advantage of first-class, first-party support for your Microsoft workloads.”

Note: See all the advantages of running on-premise VMware workloads in Azure in the article below:

https://azure.microsoft.com/mediahandler/files/resourcefiles/58e3ce15-a9fd-452b-9d4a-842ac5fe853f/VMware_to_Azure_migration_TCO_guidance.pdf

Azure Hybrid Use Benefit

The Azure Hybrid Use Benefit program lets Enterprise Agreement customers, who are already owning Windows Server Licenses with Software Assurance, make use of their own licenses in Microsoft Azure Infrastructure-As-a-Service (IaaS). Normally, the license costs are included in the IaaS resource costs. When activating Azure HUB, you’re resource costs will be downsized to 82 % on monthly annual basis.

Dependencies

Within the Azure Migrate Console it is also possible to create dependencies to provide the best approach to Azure. Just when Virtual Machines are relaying on other systems in your workload, there is now a possibility to create a collection of machines to make sure the right sequence of migration will apply before migrating to Microsoft Azure IaaS.

Note: For the Dependencies feature, it is required to install a Microsoft Monitoring Agent (MMA) on each machine. The agent is available for Windows and for Linux Operating Systems.



Add the Migrate Service from the Azure Marketplace

Open and login to the Azure Portal at http://portal.azure.com

Open Azure Migrate from the Marketplace

Click on Create

Note: Be aware that the service is in so called “Public Preview”, which means that it isn’t (officially) production ready. Some earlier Public Previews in the past learn that these previews are pretty stable!