How You Can Migrate From Vmware To Azure?

Migration can be done from VMware to Azure using agentless migration with the Azure Migrate Server Migration tool.

Azure cloud application development helps in providing a central hub for tracking discovery, assessment, and migration of your on-premises applications as well as workloads, AWS/GCP VM instances to Microsoft Azure. Azure Migrate tools for assessment and migration is provided by the hub. Also, a third party software vendor is also offered by the hub along with these tools. There are a few steps that are needed to be followed for migration which include:

• Preparation of VMs for migration
• Addition of Azure Migration Server tool
• Discovery of VMs that the user needs to migrate
• Replication of VMs
• Running of a test migration. This enables the user to ensure that everything is working as per the users’ expectations
• Running of a full VM migration

Methods of Migration:

The users can use Azure’s Migrate server integration tool to migrate VMware VM’s to Microsoft Azure. For VMware VM migration there are few options available on this tool:

• Agentless replication is used for migration. Users can migrate VM’s without even installing anything on them.
• The agent for replication is used for migration. Users need to install an agent on the VM for the purpose of replication.

Prerequisites:

There are a few things that must be done before migration. It includes points such as:

1. User needs to set up Azure and VMware. For this, Azure must be prepared for migration. On the other hand, the on-premises environment must also be prepared for migration.
2. VMware VMs with Azure Migrate Server Assessment is recommended before migrating them to Azure.

Addition of Azure Migrate Server Migration tool:

If VMware VMs cannot be assessed in any way, it is required to set up an Azure Migrate project and select the Azure Migrate Server Migration tool. If there is already an Azure Migrate project set up. The user needs to follow the following steps:

1. In the Azure Migrate project, the user needs to click the Overview option.
2. In Discover, assess, and migration servers, Assess and Migrate servers need to be clicked.
3. In Migration tools, there is an option to add a migration tool that needs to clicked whenever the user needs to migrate.
4. After this, the Add tool option should be selected from Azure Migrate: Server Migration

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Setting up of the Azure Migrate appliance:

Azure Migrate server is popular as it runs a lightweight VMware VM appliance. For setting up the Azure Migrate appliance, the following steps should be followed:

• The user needs to download an OVA template file and should be imported to vCenter Server.
• The appliance should be created and must be checked so that it gets connected to Azure Migrate Server Assessment.
• Then the appliance must be configured and registered for working with it for the first time.

Provisioning For the First Time:

For the users who are trying to replicate the Azure Migrate project, The Tool, Azure Migrate Server Migration automatically the below-stated provisions in the same group of resources as of the project:

• Service Bus

A service bus is used by Azure Migrate Server Migration to send replication orchestration messages to the appliances that are the destinations.

• Account for Gateway storage

To store the state information about the VM’s that are going to be replicated the server uses the Gateway storage account.

• Account for Log storage

The replication logs for VMs are uploaded to a log storage account by the Azure Migrate Appliance. The information of replication is applied to the replica managed disks by Azure Migrate.

• Key Vault

Key Vault is used to manage the connection strings for the service bus and to access keys for the accounts used for storage that are used in replication. It is done by the Azure Migrate Appliance. The users must have set up the permissions that the key vault needs to be able to enter the storage accounts whenever they are prepared for it.

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Track and Monitor:

• Whenever the user clicks on the Replicate button, a job begins to “Start Replication”.
• The machines start their initial replication to Azure after the Start Replication job is completed successfully.
• Snapshot of VM is created during the initial replication. To replicate managed disks in Microsoft Azure Disk data from the snapshot is replicated.
• Delta replication starts after the completion of initial replication. Incremental changes are replicated periodically to on-premise disks.
• Job-status can be tracked in the portal notifications.
• The replicating status can be monitored by clicking on Replicating servers in the Server Migration option of Migration.

Running a test migration

The next step is running a test migration for the VMs. This is used before running a full migration to Azure. Steps include:

• The main function of running a test migration is to check whether the migration will work as expected or not.
• It is used to stimulate migration by creating an Azure VM. This uses the replicated data.
• Replicated test Azure VM is used to validate the migration. Also used in migration, perform app testing and addressing any issues before full migration.

After the test migration works as expected, VMs are migrated on the on-premises machines.

• After the VMs are migrated, the user can view it as well as manage it from the Virtual Machines page.

Completion of Migration

1. As soon as the migration is done, there is an option of stopping the migration.
2. For this, Azure VM Windows or Linux agent must be installed.
3. Then, any post-migration app tweaks should be performed like updating the database connection string and web server configurations.
4. Final application and migration must be performed
5. Migrated Azure VM instance should be cut.
6. On-premises VMs from local VM inventory as well as on-premises VMs from local backups must be cut
7. Any internal documentation to show the new location and IP address of the Azure VMs must be updated.

Azure cloud solutions are renowned for their optimum storage capacity. Thus in this way the user can migrate from VMware to Azure.