Lift and shift your Hyper-V servers using Azure Migrate

Hey there! Just your friendly techie enthusiast trying out some new cloud experiments in Microsoft Azure and my Hyper-V environment. Today, while shuddering from the chill of an early fall, I decided to simulate a lift and shift of an "on premise" Microsoft Hyper-V server up to my Azure Subscription using none other than "drum.....rollllll" Azure Migrate! I think this becomes more increasingly relevant to customers that haven't thought about cloud migration of their servers in the past.

Ok, to get started, I needed to provision a test machine to migrate in my local Hyper-V host running on my laptop. This is to test/simulate a larger corporate Hyper-V environment.

The next thing I needed to do is install the Azure Migrate Appliance in my test Hyper-V environment. You can download the package from the Azure Portal from the Azure Migrate Service. Here you can see me configuring it and running the appliance in my local Hyper-V.

Once configured and registered, I went through a discovery and assessment process through my Azure Portal. This gives migration insight into my on-premise Hyper-V environment.

You can monitor the progress of the discovery of the Hyper-V Virtual Machines in the Azure Portal shown above in my subscription, or you can monitor directly on the Hyper-V appliance shown below.

Next, you are going to want to run an assessment on the discovered on-premises Hyper-V machines to see if they are good candidates for migrating to Microsoft Azure.

This screen is my assessment criteria where I set variances of what I am looking to do as far as right-sizing the destination machine, and picking the Azure region I want to migrate to. This will affect what options I have to migrate and reflect overall costs.

This is the assessment selection group screen where I select the servers that I want to be assessed based on my migration criteria above.

After an assessment is completed, I can check out the details regarding the upcoming proposed migration.

Above, you see the details of that machine's assessment. It's checking if it's ready to migrate to Azure. It also recommended the Azure Virtual Machine size based on the assessment. The estimated monthly costs are shown for the machine in the cloud. Finally, whether it is eligible/suitable for a lift and shift migration. Really cool decision making tool all one one screen!

Ok, step one is completed for our lift and shift experiment! Let's get to migratin' !!

The first step in this phase (Migration) is to replicate your servers to Azure from on-premise utilizing the Azure Migrate Appliance and Azure Site Recovery Provider.

You want to make sure that your appliance replication provider registration for the Hyper-V host is installed as shown below in my portal as an example.

Here it is on the Hyper-V appliance side!

Once the migration and replication tools are registered you can kick off a replication job illustrated below from my Azure Portal.

Once your replication job is running you can monitor it in the Azure Portal. Also, you can monitor right inside Hyper-V Manager.

Once the replication is completed, you should get the status displayed in the Azure Portal as shown below. It should show a Protected Status! Excellent!

Cool! Now, we are ready for the next phase to run a test migration before the real thing!

You can see the test migration job teed up above, and below you can check out the details of the Migration steps so far under the overview section. Here we see our replica is healthy, and our test migration was successful to Azure. We are all set for the actual migration Step 3! Onward!

Here we can see where I am configuring the job after hitting the Migrate button on the above screen.

Next, we can see the job process.

Now, we can see the that the job completed successfully!

On the overview screen, we should see that all 3 main steps are completed in the migration process.

Congratulations! We have successfully lifted and shifted an on premises machine from Hyper-V and it is now running inside Microsoft Azure! This experiment was pretty cool and I was able to get it all done on my laptop running Hyper-V Manager and Azure Migrate. Really cool and easy to use, install, and configure! Until next time! Stay warm!

References:

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/azure-migrate/