A Comprehensive Guide to Azure Migrate: Simplifying Your Cloud Migration Journey

Azure Migrate is a powerful platform that provides a simplified and streamlined approach to migrating, modernizing, and optimizing your infrastructure, data, and applications for the Azure cloud. Whether you’re looking to migrate on-premises servers, databases, web apps, or virtual desktops, Azure Migrate offers a comprehensive suite of tools and services to make your cloud journey a success.

Unified Migration Platform

At the heart of Azure Migrate is a single, unified portal that allows you to start, run, and track your migration to Azure. This centralized hub gives you access to a range of assessment and migration tools, making it easier to manage your entire cloud migration lifecycle.

Extensive Tool Support

Azure Migrate integrates with a variety of first-party and third-party tools, expanding the scope of supported use cases. These tools include:

  • Azure Migrate: Discovery and Assessment: Discover and assess on-premises servers, SQL Servers, and web apps to determine their readiness for migration to Azure.
  • Migration and Modernization: Migrate VMware VMs, Hyper-V VMs, physical servers, and other virtualized servers to Azure.
  • Data Migration Assistant: Assess SQL Server databases for migration to Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Managed Instance, or Azure VMs running SQL Server.
  • Azure Database Migration Service: Migrate on-premises databases to Azure VMs, Azure SQL Database, or Azure SQL Managed Instances.
  • Web App Migration Assistant: Assess and migrate on-premises web apps to Azure App Service and Azure Kubernetes Service.
  • Azure Data Box: Migrate large amounts of offline data to Azure quickly and cost-effectively.

Seamless ISV Integration

Azure Migrate also integrates with a wide range of independent software vendor (ISV) offerings, allowing you to leverage specialized tools and expertise for your migration and modernization efforts. Some of the integrated ISVs include Carbonite, Cloudamize, CloudSphere, Corent Technology, Device42, Lakeside, RackWare, Turbonomic, UnifyCloud, and Zerto.

Discover, Assess, and Migrate

The Azure Migrate platform provides a comprehensive set of capabilities to guide you through the entire migration process:

  1. Discovery and Assessment: The Azure Migrate: Discovery and Assessment tool helps you discover on-premises servers, SQL Servers, and web apps, and assess their readiness for migration to Azure. It also provides insights into Azure VM sizing, cost estimation, and dependency analysis.

  2. Migration and Modernization: The Migration and Modernization tool enables you to migrate various workloads to Azure, including VMware VMs, Hyper-V VMs, physical servers, and web apps hosted on Windows OS in a VMware environment.

  3. Modernization: Azure Migrate’s extensible framework allows you to integrate with third-party tools to modernize your applications and infrastructure, such as containerizing .NET Framework web apps or migrating to Azure PaaS services.

Simplified Management and Tracking

The Azure Migrate hub simplifies the management and tracking of your migration projects. When you add an ISV tool to your Azure Migrate project, you can easily obtain a license, connect the tool to Azure Migrate, and monitor the progress of your migration across all the integrated tools.

Azure Migrate Versions

Azure Migrate offers two versions:

  1. Current Version: The current version of Azure Migrate provides the most up-to-date features and capabilities for discovery, assessment, and migration. This is the version you should use for new projects.

  2. Previous Version: Also known as classic Azure Migrate, the previous version only supports the assessment of on-premises servers running on VMware. This version will be retired in February 2024, and you should migrate to the current version of Azure Migrate for your future projects.

Get Started with Azure Migrate

To begin your cloud migration journey with Azure Migrate, follow these steps:

  1. Review the tutorials to assess VMware VMs, Hyper-V VMs, or physical servers for migration.
  2. Explore the frequently asked questions to get a better understanding of Azure Migrate.
  3. If you have any specific questions or need assistance, don’t hesitate to reach out to the Azure Migrate team.

By leveraging the comprehensive capabilities of Azure Migrate, you can streamline your cloud migration, modernization, and optimization efforts, ensuring a smooth and successful transition to the Azure cloud.

[Source: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/MicrosoftDocs/azure-docs/main/articles/migrate/migrate-services-overview.md]