How to get started with Azure Migrate?

In this article, I’ll introduce you to the Azure Migrate service which was created to help assess your on-premises environment and provide you with cost estimates to move your workloads to Azure.

What is Azure Migrate?

Azure Migrate is a free service provided by Microsoft. This service (at the time of this article) can be used to assess your on-premises VMWare environment (the option to assess local physical workloads and Hyper-V is on the roadmap). This service allows you to create and retain multiple projects at no cost. Supported regions for these projects include the US, Europe, Asia, and the Azure Government.

Support for Hyper-V is currently in preview with production support, if you are interested in trying it out, please sign up here.

How does Azure Migrate High-Level Architecture look like?

What are Azure Migrate Product Features?

• Discover on-premises VMs and app dependencies
• Mitigate VM migration issues with built-in guidance
• Adjust and optimize cloud resources based on utilization
• Get tool recommendations to use for migration
• View dependencies to group VMs effectively for migration
• Try Azure Migrate free for the first 180 days of each migration project

Why use Azure Migrate?

1. Assess Azure readiness: Assess whether your on-premises machines are suitable for running in Azure.
2. Get size recommendations: Get size recommendations for Azure VMs based on the performance history of on-premises VMs.
3. Estimate monthly costs: Get estimated costs for running on-premises machines in Azure.
4. Migrate with high confidence: Visualize dependencies of on-premises machines to create groups of machines that you will assess and migrate together.

What are the Prerequisites?

VMware: The VMs that you plan to migrate must be managed by vCenter Server running version 5.5, 6.0, 6.5, or 6.7. Additionally, you need one ESXi host running version 5.5 or higher to deploy the collector VM.

vCenter Server account: You need a read-only account to access the vCenter Server. Azure Migrate uses this account to discover the on-premises VMs.

Permissions: On the vCenter Server, you need permissions to create a VM by importing a file in .OVA format.

How does Azure Migrate Work?

The Azure Migrate service provides an appliance called the collector appliance. This appliance is a Windows Server VMware virtual machine which you import into your VMware environment. After you have created a project, and have associated the appliance with your cloud project ID and key, it begins to gather performance information for up to 1500 virtual machines in your environment. 

The longer the appliance and agents are allowed to run, the greater the accuracy for the cost estimates.

How To Get Started?

As mentioned, the Azure Migrate feature is a free service, however, you do need to have a valid subscription to use it. To get started, log into your Azure portal. Next, search for Azure Migrate.

Creating a project is pretty straight forward. You need to provide the following information.

1. Project name
2. Subscription
3. Resource Group (choose existing or create new)
4. Geography (the region where project metadata will be stored)

And that’s it. You should have an Azure Migrate project listed in your resources. Select the Migrate project. You will see a Getting Started in the overview blade with a Discover and Assess button.

There are two steps in the process…yep, discovering and assessing.

In the first step, you will click Discover Machines which will step you through the process of downloading the OVA file for the collector appliance and associated the project id and key with your project.

Microsoft did a great job making this process as easy as possible. As we see in the image below, they provide the necessary steps to get up and running quickly including providing the project ID and Project keys.

Once the collector is configured and starts collecting information, it will send the metadata to your configured Azure Migrate project. This process should only take a few minutes based on the number of systems you have in your environment. You will see a notification in your project blade when it has received the data.

How to Create and View an Assessment?

After VMs are discovered in the portal, you group them and create assessments. You can immediately create as on-premises assessments once the VMs are discovered in the portal.

You can create a new assessment group or use an existing. Next, you will select which machines you want to be included in the assessment and then click Create Assessment. Be sure to select those workloads you are thinking of migrating to Azure.

How does Assessment Details look like?

An assessment includes information about whether the on-premises VMs are compatible for Azure, what would be the right VM size for running the VM in Azure and the estimated monthly Azure costs.

The Azure readiness view in the assessment shows the readiness status of each VM. Depending on the properties of the VM, each VM can be marked as:

• Ready for Azure
• Conditionally ready for Azure
• Not ready for Azure
• Readiness unknown

Estimated monthly costs for computing and storage are aggregated for all VMs in the group.

What Happens after an Assessment?

After you've assessed on-premises machines, you can use a couple of tools to perform the migration:

• Azure Site Recovery: You can use Azure Site Recovery to migrate to Azure. To do this, you prepare the Azure components you need, including a storage account and virtual network. On-premises, you prepare your VMware environment. When everything's prepared, you set up and enable replication to Azure, and migrate the VMs. Learn more.
• Azure Database Migration: If on-premises machines are running a database such as SQL Server, MySQL, or Oracle, you can use the Azure Database Migration Service to migrate them to Azure.

What else you could do?

There’s a lot more than just cost estimates in Azure Migrate. We haven’t even discussed the dependency mapping or how to modify the properties for our assessments.  Check out these resources to go deeper into the weeds with Azure Migrate and these additional concepts.

Bottom Line

Azure Migrate is a great FREE resource for you to use to determine whether or not you may save money by transitioning from a cap-ex operating model to an op-ex model. They provide granular controls for you to scale the workloads up or down to see play with best and worst case scenario numbers for your assessments. 

Planning in advance can help reduce those bad experiences and Azure Migrate is one of many tools you can use to ensure a smooth migration to Azure while walking away from the hardware and infrastructure update fatigue.

Thanks

Susanth