When Microsoft announced Azure Migrate at Ignite, I was enticed and signed up for the limited preview. Having being accepted to the program I thought I would share my initial thoughts.
What Is Azure Migrate?
It a set of tools provided by Microsoft to enable you to provide a high level overview of your on-premises virtual machines and a possible migration approach to Microsoft Azure.
It’s components are as follows:
- OVA file which is Windows Server 2012 R2 that runs a Collector that connects to vCenter to extract information.
- Unique credentials that are entered into the Collector to securely report back information to Migrate PaaS within your Azure Subscription
- Assessment that enables you to group virtual machines into readiness for Azure along with expected monthly costs
- Azure Readiness assessment per virtual machine with data customization
- Data export to Microsoft Excel to enable further information manipulation
- Integration with OMS solution pack Service Map to provide application dependency mapping, communication paths, performance data and update requirements
On-Premises Support
In the limited preview, the support for on-premises systems in limited to vCenter 5.5 and 6.0. However, I ran the Collector against a vCenter Server Appliance 6.5 without any issues.
The guest operating system extends to those supported by Microsoft Azure, which makes sense.
Known Issues
As this is a limited preview, I’m sure that these issues will be resolved in due course.
- Windows Server 2016 showing as an ‘Unsupported OS’ in Azure Readiness report
- SQL not providing a link to the Azure Database Migration Service
- For 182 VMs the suggested tool is always ‘Requires Deep Discovery’
Final Thought
Azure Migrate will be a good starting point (when it is generally available) to provide a high level overview of readiness for Azure. It will require human intervention to overlay application considerations to ensure they are natively highly available to meet customer SLA’s.
VMFocus 
Same thoughts as me Craig 😂