What's new in Azure Migrate?

Introduction

The journey to the cloud is an essential step for modern enterprises looking to leverage the benefits of scalability, flexibility, and cost-efficiency. A crucial part of this transformation is understanding the current state of your IT infrastructure, including workloads, applications, and their interdependencies. Often, organizations aim to set their migration goals based on the applications they want to move to the cloud, rather than focusing on individual servers or databases in isolation.

I am thrilled to share that Azure Migrate is evolving to both simplify and enrich your cloud adoption journey. We are introducing new capabilities in Azure Migrate to help you achieve your goals.

Introducing Application awareness in Azure Migrate [limited preview]

A key step in any cloud transformation plan is a current state analysis of the entire IT estate covering workloads and applications, and relationships/ dependencies among them.

I am excited to announce the limited preview of application aware experiences in Azure Migrate – across every phase of the migration journey. This allows you to gain insights into the total cost of ownership, identify suitable IaaS and PaaS targets, and receive tailored migration and modernization guidance.

 

To get started with Azure Migrate, simply create an Azure Migrate project on Azure portal, and leverage Azure Migrate’s wide-ranging discovery capabilities, including the Azure Migrate appliance or importing inventory via RVTools to discover your environment. This allows you to explore inventory across Infra-Data-Web tiers and use the updated dependency analysis to identify application boundaries. As part of the application aware experiences, we are introducing the concept of tags within Azure Migrate. So once dependencies are identified, you can group the dependent workloads comprising an application via tags.

Then, Azure Migrate can be used to create application-specific business cases to identify savings and ROI, assess ideal migration strategies, and get recommendations for Azure services, SKUs, resource costs, and migration/modernization tools.

Further, as part of executing the migration and onboarding to Azure, customers can use the recommended tools to modernize via re-platform and refactor (out of band) techniques or use the integrated rehost migration experience to rehost to Azure VM.

Complemented with a refreshed user experience

As part of delivering application awareness and sustainability insights, Azure Migrate will also feature a refreshed user interface. The new experience is designed to help customers across every step of the migration journey – across Decide, Plan and Execute phases. The experience provides you with a new intuitive table of contents and overview page to allow easy navigation. You can explore discovered workloads and their relationships through effective search, sort, and seamless transition from Azure Migrate to other specialized migration tools, depending on your specific goals and requirements. Finally, you can quickly create and visualize different migration and modernization strategies side-by-side.

Expanded support for workloads and platforms

In addition to the capabilities described above, Azure Migrate continues to evolve to support capabilities provided by Azure for customers to evaluate and execute as part of their cloud adoption journey. As part of this effort, I am pleased to announce public preview of the following capabilities. These capabilities are available for customers, partners and sellers to try today!

ROI/TCO of Azure Arc in Azure Migrate Business Case [public preview]

We understand that customers are looking to understand the best path as they evaluate the cloud. This includes continuing to stay on-premises in their current environment while benefiting from Azure services such as  Azure Arc. Knowing the varying needs of every customer and with the goal to meet customers where they are, we are introducing the envisioning  of  ROI for Azure Arc in Azure Migrate Business Case. This includes -

Azure Migrate business case to help you compare the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for on-premises estates versus Azure, including year-on-year cash flow analysis. With this new capability, the Azure Migrate Business Case now includes the added value of Azure Arc for resources remaining on-premises during the customer’s migration journey. You can now visualize cost savings and other benefits of using Azure security and management tools via Azure Arc for your on-premises servers and see licensing benefits such as Extended Security Updates and SQL Pay-As-You-Go.

In addition to visualizing the business case for Arc, customers can identify and at-scale onboard machines that are not yet Arc-enabled directly from the Azure Migrate portal.

Additional details and step by step instructions can be found here.

Support for migrations to Azure Stack HCI [public preview]

Azure Stack HCI enables customers to run workloads in the private cloud or edge and offers an ideal platform for modernizing workloads with enhanced performance, scalability, simplified management, and cost efficiency.

To support this modernization, we have introduced the ability to migrate virtual machines from Hyper-V and VMware environments to Azure Stack HCI using Azure Migrate: Server Migrations.

Like Azure migrations, you can leverage Azure Migrate to discover virtual machines from VMware and Hyper-V environments at scale, without needing prior agent installation. After discovery, you can migrate virtual machines to Azure Stack HCI through an easy-to-use Azure Migrate portal experience, ensuring zero data loss and minimal downtime. This migration keeps data flow locally from on-premises to Azure Stack HCI. Learn more about this capability here.

Expanded OSS Support in Azure Migrate [public preview]

Azure Migrate has been diligently expanding its capabilities to better support customers using Linux. We are thrilled to highlight three significant updates that enhance your migration experience:

Support for newer Linux Distributions [public preview]

Azure Migrate now supports a range of newer Linux distributions, including Rocky Linux, Alma Linux, SLES 15, RHEL 9, and Ubuntu 22.04. This enhancement ensures a broader compatibility for Linux workloads, allowing you to migrate  seamlessly, whether  using agentless or agent-based migrations.

Azure Hybrid Benefit (AHB) for Enterprise Linux [public preview]

We've integrated Azure Hybrid Benefit (AHB) for Enterprise Linux (RHEL and SLES) into the migration process. Customers can visualize the savings from AHB directly in Azure Migrate business case assessments, maximizing their return on investment.

To leverage AHB, you can directly enable the appropriate licenses for migrating Enterprise Linux machines within Azure Migrate. This integration eliminates the need for manual installation of the AHB extension post migrations, streamlining the migration workflow and ensuring compliance.

Discovery and Assessment of MySQL Databases [public preview]

In our endeavor to increase coverage of OSS workloads in Azure Migrate, we are announcing discovery and modernization assessment of MySQL databases running on Linux servers. Customers previously had limited visibility in their MySQL workloads and often received generalized VM lift-and-shift recommendations. With this new capability, you can now accurately identify the MySQL workloads and assess them for right-sizing into Azure Database for MySQL: Flexible Server.

CSV Import powered discovery for SQL Servers [limited preview]

We understand that deploying an appliance may not be the quickest way to generate migration assessments to enable planning. Further, many times customers can’t provide credentials for SQL Server instances, to allow Azure Migrate to capture relevant details and provide accurate readiness and right-sized recommendations. Hence, we are now adding the ability to import SQL Server details which can then be used to discover SQL Server instances and databases and generate accurate assessment reports. Use existing repositories such as SQL Server Dynamic Management Views, SCOM etc. to populate the CSV schema required to discover SQL Server.

Interested in trying the limited preview experience?

The capabilities described above are currently in limited preview. To take advantage of these capabilities for your environment, please share your interest here.

Conclusion

The enhancements in Azure Migrate underscore our commitment to providing comprehensive, user-friendly, and efficient migration solutions. Stay tuned for more updates and join us at Ignite 2024 for a detailed demo of these exciting new features.

Curious to learn more? Here is a sneak peek of what we plan to announce at Ignite - https://youtu.be/aquRVLvau7c