Hello, everyone, and welcome back. Let's talk a little bit about what all is involved when assessing and migrating VMware virtual machines using Azure Migrate.

When it's time to migrate VMware virtual machines to Azure, there are several steps that need to be undertaken, starting with the assessment preparation. To prepare for assessment, you need to prepare Azure to work with Azure Migrate. You need to prepare the VMware environment for VM assessment, and you need to prepare VMware for actual VM migration.

To prepare Azure, you need to ensure that you have permissions to create an Azure Migrate project. And you need to have permissions to register the Azure Migrate appliance that will be created and used for assessment and migration. You'll also need to ensure that you have permissions to create a Key Vault since Azure Migrate will create a Key Vault that will be used to manage access keys to the replication storage account within the subscription.

For a complete and detailed list of preparation steps to take in order to prepare Azure, visit the URL that you see on your screen.

After ensuring Azure is prepared to support Azure Migrate, you'll need to prepare VMware. To prepare VMware for VM assessment, you'll need to verify VMware settings to ensure that the vCenter server and VMs that you'll be migrating actually meet Azure Migrate's requirements. You'll need to ensure that the VMware VMs that you want to assess are managed by a vCenter server running version 5.5, 6.0, 6.5, or 6.7. And you also need to ensure that Azure Migrate has access to the vCenter server so it can discover VMs for assessment and for migration. This means that you may need to set up an assessment account that Azure Migrate can use to access the vCenter server to discover VMs for assessment.

Once you have the VMware environment prepared for assessment, you can then prepare it for migration. The migration preparations you make will depend on whether you are planning an agentless migration or an agent-based migration. Now, rather than listing all the different requirements out here, what I'm going to do is just refer you to the URL that you see on your screen. At this URL, you can view all the necessary requirements for both agentless and agent-based preparations along with more assessment preparation details for VMware.

Once you've completed your assessment preparations, you can move on to the actual assessment of your VMware virtual machines.

The assessment consists of several key steps. These include the setup of an Azure Migrate project and the setup of an Azure Migrate appliance that will run on-prem to assess your VMs. With the Azure Migrate appliance set up, you can then begin continuous discovery of the on-prem VMs. The appliance will send configuration and performance data for your discovered VMs to Azure. Lastly, you'll want to group the discovered VMs, assess the VM group, or groups for that matter, and then, finally, review your assessment.

For complete details on performing VMware assessments, visit the URL that you see on your screen.

Once you've completed and reviewed your assessment, you can perform the actual migrations. You'll have two options. You can perform agentless migrations or agent-based migrations. If you choose to perform an agentless migration, you can migrate your VMware virtual machines without the need to install anything on them. Conversely, performing an agent-based migration will require you to install an agent on the VMs to perform replication.

For a complete comparison of these migration options along with the complete list of steps for each, visit the URL that you see on your screen.

Join me in the next lesson where I'll cover the assessment and migration of Hyper-V machines.