Forum Discussion
Migrate VMs with NO Access to Hypervisor
Scenario: I have a handful of VMs running at a colo facility that need to migrate to Azure VMs. We only have access to the guest OSes, and have NO access to the hypervisor, vCenter management or physical servers. Our colo operator uses a shared management environment and will not grant even read access to our resources.
What's the best approach to move/migrate these to Azure IaaS?
1. Capture and generalize your VM image(s).
2. If necessary, convert the generalized image(s) to .VHD
3. Upload, Import/Export, or DataBox the generalized image to an Azure Storage page blob.
4. Read the rest: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/windows/overview
I have encountered this as well. How I overcame this is treating these servers as if they were a physical box. Keep in mind when migrating physical machines to Azure you don't have a path to fail back to on premise. So you may have a data mismatch if you ever power them back on in the other data center. Leo_Jay
