With the push to the cloud accelerating, it’s critical to understand how to migrate on-premises servers to Microsoft Azure. As an IT professional, you are likely to encounter situations where you need to plan and execute such migrations.
This course provides an overview of the Azure Migrate offering and the various Azure Migrate integrations that are available, before moving on to assessing and migrating VMware virtual machines, Hyper-V machines, and physical machines.
After preparing for migration, this course will walk you through a guided demonstration of an actual assessment and migration of a VMware virtual machine to Microsoft Azure. By the time you finish this course, you should have a full understanding of the Azure Migrate Service and the different options that are available for using it to migrate servers to Microsoft Azure.
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Learning Objectives
- Assess and migrate VMware virtual machines, Hyper-V machines, and physical machines
- Set up and prepare Azure and VMware for Azure Migrate
- Learn about the Azure Migrate Server Migration tool, appliance VMs, and continuous discovery
- Understand all the steps necessary to carry out the migration of a VMware virtual machine to Microsoft Azure
Intended Audience
- IT professionals interested in becoming Azure cloud architects or preparing for Microsoft’s Azure certification exams
- IT professionals tasked with managing and supporting Azure virtual machines
Prerequisites
- General knowledge of IT infrastructure
- General knowledge of the Azure environment and VMware
Azure Migrate is an Azure offering that assists organizations with the migration of on-prem infrastructure, apps, and data to Microsoft Azure. It's essentially a centralized hub that you can use to track discovery, assessment, and migration of such workloads.
Azure Migrate offers a single pane of glass that you can use to start, run, and track migrations to Azure. It provides a range of tools to perform both assessments and migrations, and it even integrates with other Azure services and independent software vendor offerings.
To assess on-prem servers and migrate them to Microsoft Azure, you can use the Azure Migrate Server Assessment Tool and the Azure Migrate Server Migration Tool.
Using Azure Migrate, you can also assess on-prem databases for migration to Azure using the Azure Database Migration Assistant. The actual database migrations are completed using the Azure Database Migration Service.
You can use the Azure App Service Migration Assistant to assess and migrate on-prem web applications to the Azure App Service. If you need to migrate an on-prem VDI or virtual desktop infrastructure to Windows Virtual Desktop in Azure, there are ISV tools that can help you assess and migrate those workloads.
The Azure Data Box family of products can be used to migrate large amounts of data to Azure if necessary.
Azure Migrate, as a part of a migration strategy, leverages an Azure Migrate appliance. This lightweight appliance is deployed by Azure Migrate and is used for discovery and assessment of on-prem VMware virtual machines, Hyper-V virtual machines, and physical machines.
The Azure Migrate appliance is used by both Azure Migrate Server Assessment and Azure Migrate Server Migration to perform agentless migrations. It continuously discovers server metadata and performance data that's used for assessment and migration.
Some of the newer features and improvements to Azure Migrate include the ability to perform physical server assessments and the ability to perform import-based assessments, which are assessments of machines using metadata and performance data that's provided with a CSV file.
Azure Migrate also now supports application-level discovery of applications, roles, and features via the Azure Migrate appliance for VMware VMs. However, I should point out that this is limited to discovery only. Assessments are not currently supported.
With the new agentless dependency visualization, you no longer have to explicitly install agents for dependency visualization. Agentless and agent-based are both now supported.
I should also mention that a few assessment and migration tools have also been added to Azure Migrate, as well. They include RackWare, which offers cloud migration, and Movere, which offers assessment.
Tom is a 25+ year veteran of the IT industry, having worked in environments as large as 40k seats and as small as 50 seats. Throughout the course of a long an interesting career, he has built an in-depth skillset that spans numerous IT disciplines. Tom has designed and architected small, large, and global IT solutions.
In addition to the Cloud Platform and Infrastructure MCSE certification, Tom also carries several other Microsoft certifications. His ability to see things from a strategic perspective allows Tom to architect solutions that closely align with business needs.
In his spare time, Tom enjoys camping, fishing, and playing poker.