Network-attached storage (NAS) holds much of an enterprise’s data; home directories, project shares, media libraries, application data, and analytics datasets, often spanning tens or hundreds of terabytes across protocols and administrative boundaries. Moving this estate to Azure starts not with copying data, but with understanding what you have, where each share should go, and what it will cost.
Building on the file share assessment capability we announced in May, today we’re announcing the public preview of NAS share discovery and assessment in Azure Migrate. It connects directly to Dell PowerScale/Isilon and NetApp ONTAP clusters, inventories every SMB, NFS, and S3 share, and assesses each against Azure Files, Azure Blob Storage, and Azure NetApp Files—providing readiness, right-sized configurations, cost estimates, and migration tooling guidance. Your NAS assets now join servers, applications, and databases in the same Azure Migrate project, inventory, and business case.
Why does this matter
NAS planning has historically been done with spreadsheets, vendor-specific tools, and a lot of manual reconciliation. Storage ends up being assessed separately from the servers and applications that depend on it, which makes it hard to sequence a migration or defend a budget. This capability is designed to help you:
- Replace manual inventory with automated discoveries across Dell and NetApp platforms, so you can go from "we think we have a few thousand shares" to a verified, per-share inventory.
- Effectively plan your NAS shares alongside everything else. NAS clusters and their shares appear in the same Azure Migrate inventory as your VMware, Hyper-V, and physical servers, databases, and web apps.
- Make your informed decision before you migrate. Each share gets a readiness verdict, a recommended Azure service and SKU, and a monthly cost estimate.
What's available in public preview
- Add Dell or NetApp NAS clusters: Discover Dell PowerScale / Isilon (OneFS) and NetApp ONTAP AFF / FAS clusters, and inventory every SMB, NFS, and S3 shares they host — including shares exposed through more than one protocol.
- Explore and review on-prem shares and workloads: Review cluster and share details in the portal: model, nodes, total and used capacity, protocol versions, volume, and estimated size. Group and filter shares by tag — by business unit, cost center, or application — so related workloads can be planned together.
- Suitable Azure storage targets: Assess each share against Azure Files, Azure Blob Storage, and Azure NetApp Files, with control over target region, sizing criteria, comfort factor, redundancy, media type, access frequency, and workload type.
- Alternative migration paths: Compare various migration paths side by side — a recommended mixed path that sends each share to its best-fit service, alongside single-service alternatives — with readiness, monthly cost, and estimated emissions for each.
- Business case: Build a business case for a NAS-only estate or for a mixed estate of VMs and NAS, comparing a modernization approach against lift-and-shift.
End-to-end experience
The experience follows the same guided workflow you already know from Azure Migrate.
1. Enable the feature
Install the latest Azure Migrate appliance or turn on auto-update, so your existing appliance picks up the new capability. Unlike file shares hosted on Windows and Linux servers, NAS clusters need to be added explicitly: in the appliance configuration manager, add a credential of source type NAS Server, then add a discovery source of type NAS Server with your cluster's FQDN and port. The account needs read-only permission at cluster level — Azure Migrate only reads metadata and never writes to your storage.
2. Discover your NAS estate
Create an Azure Migrate project, deploy the appliance on VMware, Hyper-V, or a physical server, and point it at your clusters. The appliance connects to each cluster's management endpoint and collects system and share metadata, vendor, product and model, operating system version, cluster nodes, total and used capacity, share and bucket paths, protocols and protocol versions; followed by performance signals such as IOPS and throughput.
Discovered clusters and their shares appear as first-class inventory objects, listed alongside the Windows and Linux file servers the appliance already finds. Filter by type, search, tag, and export the inventory at whatever scale your estate demands. Discovery runs a daily cycle and updates existing items as new metadata arrives, so the picture improves over time rather than being a one-shot snapshot.
Discovered NetApp ONTAP and Dell Isilon OneFS clusters and their shares in Azure Migrate inventory.3. Create an assessment
Select the shares you care about — individually, by tag, or a whole cluster at a time — and create an assessment. The share is the unit of assessment, so every SMB, NFS, or S3 share receives its own verdict rather than inheriting one from its host.
Assessment settings let you shape the recommendation to your environment: choose the target Azure region, pick as-is or performance-based sizing, set a comfort factor for headroom, and configure redundancy, Azure Files media preferences, and Azure Blob access frequency. A workload type setting from general purpose file shares through to AI/ML and mission-critical, helps Azure Migrate recommend an appropriate performance level. Azure NetApp Files is added to the evaluation automatically when the source share is detected on NetApp NAS. Settings can be changed, and the assessment recalculated at any time.
File share assessment settings, where you choose target services, workload type, redundancy, media preferences, and access frequency.4. Review results and build the business case
Results are organized as migration paths. The recommended path routes each share to its best-fit Azure service and is shown next to single-service alternatives, so you can compare readiness and cost on the same basis. Key insights include:
- Readiness for every share — Ready, Ready with conditions, or Not ready — with the warnings that need attention before you move.
- A recommended Azure configuration per share. For example, a multi-protocol NetApp volume is recommended for Azure NetApp Files, while a general-purpose SMB share is recommended for Azure Files with a specific media type and redundancy.
- Provisioned size, IOPS, and throughput behind the recommendation, plus the reasoning Azure Migrate used to select the SKU and access tier.
- Monthly cost estimates per share and per path, an on-premises versus Azure TCO comparison, and estimated carbon savings.
Next, you can generate a wave plan to sequence the migration or build a business case that helps you with cost modernizing Azure storage services.
Assessment results showing the recommended path, source-to-target mappings, estimated Azure TCO, and carbon savings.
Note: All screenshots in this post are from a sample environment. Cluster and share names, capacity values, readiness distributions, cost and TCO estimates, and emissions figures are illustrative and shown for reference and indicative purposes only. They are not a price quote. Your own results depend on your discovered environment, the assessment settings you choose, your target Azure region, and the pricing and offers that apply to your subscription.
Prepare for migration with the right tool
Assessment tells you where each share should go; Azure Migrate then points you at the tool to get it there. Azure Storage Mover is the recommended path for moving shares to Azure Files and Azure Blob Storage. For ONTAP volumes heading to Azure NetApp Files, the Azure NetApp Files migration assistant is recommended, and Azure File Sync remains the option for active sync and hybrid scenarios with Windows file servers. To learn more about our recommendations for unstructured data migration, visit https://aka.ms/migratemydata.
Get started
Update your Azure Migrate appliance, add your first NAS cluster, and let a discovery cycle run. Within a few hours you'll start to see a per-share picture of your NAS estate; you can then create an assessment to view the right target service to migrate to Azure.
Learn more in our documentation.
- Connect and discover your NAS appliance
- Review discovered NAS resources
- Create a fileshare assessment of NAS shares
- Review NAS File share assessment recommendations
Write to us at azurestoragemigrations@microsoft.com with questions or feedback, or to suggest additional NAS systems you’d like this capability to support. We look forward to hearing from you!
Microsoft