What is Azure Migrate?

Azure Migrate is a service that helps you decide on, plan, and execute your migration to Azure. Azure Migrate helps you find the best migration path, assess for Azure readiness and cost of hosting workloads on Azure, and perform the migration with minimal downtime and risk. Azure Migrate provides support for servers, databases, web apps, virtual desktops, and large-scale offline migration by using Azure Data Box.

Migration phases

Azure Migrate provides a simplified migration, modernization, and optimization service for customers who want to migrate their on-premises workloads to Azure. It gives you a one-stop solution for migrating your infrastructure, data, and web application workloads.

A general migration journey includes the following phases. Azure Migrate provides support at each phase.

Decide

The first step in a migration journey is to identify your workloads. This process of identification is called discovery. To discover your workloads, you can deploy a lightweight Azure Migrate appliance (recommended approach) or quickly import the inventory data for your workloads.

The Azure Migrate appliance is a virtual appliance that can be deployed on a server in your datacenter. The appliance collects the configuration and performance data for your servers and continually sends it to the Azure Migrate service.

After you identify the inventory of workloads, you can create a business case to make your decision to migrate your on-premises workloads to Azure. A business case helps you estimate the costs and savings of moving to Azure. It helps you identify:

• Total cost of ownership for on-premises versus Azure.
• Year-over-year comparison of cash flows.
• Resource utilization-based insights on Azure targets.
• Long-term cost reduction by switching from a capital expenditure (CapEx) model to an operating expenditure (OpEx) model.

Learn more about business cases.

Plan

After you make the decision to migrate to Azure, the next important phase of migration is planning. To plan migration in detail, use Azure Migrate assessments to find:

• Azure readiness: Assess whether on-premises servers, SQL servers, and web apps are ready for migration to Azure.
• Right-sizing: Estimate the size of Azure virtual machines (VMs), the Azure SQL configuration, and the number of Azure VMware Solution nodes after migration.
• Azure cost estimation: Estimate costs for running on-premises servers in Azure.
• Dependency analysis: Understand the network dependencies between servers in your datacenter so that you can make high-confidence migration plans without missing any critical dependency. Learn more about dependency analysis.

Execute

In the execution phase, you perform the migration or modernization of your workloads to move to Azure. You can use the Azure Migrate service or partner tools to migrate your servers, databases, web apps, or virtual desktops with minimal downtime and risk.

You can migrate the following workloads by using the integrated Azure Migrate and Modernize tool:

Benefits of Azure Migrate

Azure Migrate offers these benefits for your cloud migration journey:

• Unified migration platform: You use a single portal to start, run, and track your migration to Azure. The unified platform supports discovery, assessment, and migration of variety of workloads, like servers, databases, and web applications.

• Free service: Azure Migrate is a free service that you can use to:

  1. Identify your inventory of workloads.
  2. Assess workloads for multiple infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) Azure targets.
  3. Develop a plan for migration.
  4. Migrate the workloads by using in-product, Microsoft, and partner migration tools. (Partner tools might charge you for using their services.)

• Range of tools: Azure Migrate has tools for assessment and migration, as described later in this article.

• Assessment, migration, and modernization: In the Azure Migrate hub, you can assess, migrate, and modernize:

  • Servers: Assess on-premises servers and migrate them to Azure.

  • Databases: Assess on-premises SQL Server instances and databases to migrate them to a SQL server on an Azure VM, an Azure SQL managed instance, or an Azure SQL database.

  • Web applications: Assess on-premises web apps and migrate them to Azure App Service and Azure Kubernetes Service.

  • Data: Migrate large amounts of data to Azure quickly and cost-effectively by using Azure Data Box products.

Related content

• Try tutorials to discover VMware VMs, Hyper-V VMs, or physical servers.
• Review frequently asked questions about Azure Migrate.
• Learn about the Azure VMware Solution landing zone accelerator.