Azure Migrate v2 is live!
As regulars to my blog will know I am a huge fan of the Azure Migrate product that Microsoft released in 2018. The first iteration of the product assessed your VMware environment and provided you with insightful feedback so you could start to plan out your migration from your on-premises data center to Azure.
Version 2 is live!
In July 2019 they launched Azure Migrate v2!
This version of the product has taken into consideration the feedback from a lot of users, partners and staff and is now a much richer product. It can now be classed as a hub for your migration needs.
Integrated Experience
For a lot of people Azure Migrate v1 didn't fit their needs as it only assessed VMware environments and they had something else so often turned to a third party tool. Azure Migrate now gives you access to Microsoft and third party tools. So you can choice which ones suits your needs and environment while having the information all available within the Azure Portal.
Not only is there access to third party tools you can now initiate the Data Migration Assistant from the portal. Plus if you need to order a Data box in order to help migrate your data to Azure you can order it from the Azure Migrate blade as well! SO many cool features and functionality in one place!!
Azure Migrate: Server Migration
Within Azure Migrate we now have the ability to migrate your servers, you no longer need to look to another tool for your migration. You can assess and migrate your environment with Azure Migrate! The first thing to call out about the server migration part is it is not a replacement for Azure Site Recovery (ASR). The Azure Migrate: Server Migration tooling is only for migration and you will still need to look at other tools for Backup, or Disaster Recovery.
The Server Migration tool is agent less, so again this is another great step forward!
Migration Planning
As with version one of the tool when you do an assessment of your VMware or Hyper-V environments you get back rich data about what your environment would look like in Azure as well as costings. And you are able to run multiple to reports on this data, and I always recommend to customers that they manipulate this data to understand different options within Azure.
For example if you are looking at a straight lift and shift migration of your environment, I would run the following assessment reports:
- Run a report that tells you what the pricing would look like if you moved it "as is". So if you moved it into Azure with the same sizing it has on premises, what would the pricing be.
- Run a report showing what would happen to the price if you right sized your VM in Azure according to the performance data that's been collected
- Run a report showing what would happen if you right sized, and utilised things like Azure Hybrid Benefit and Reserved Instances
Those three reports will show you and your management team the cost benefits of the cloud and the flexibility of it, even if you are just using the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) capabilities.
Summary
I'm excited to see where Azure Migrate v2 goes in the future and will be updating my talks, and blog material to reflect the new featuers and functionality. In the meantime if you have any specific questions please do reach out to me, either by leaving a comment here on this blog or reach out to me at Twitter