What's new in Azure Migrate

  • Article

Azure Migrate helps you to discover, assess and migrate on-premises servers, apps, and data to the Azure cloud. This article summarizes new releases and features in Azure Migrate.

Note

The following released version, date, and content only corresponds to the actual deployment of the Microsoft Azure Cloud in most case.

It provides the evolution history of Azure Migrate service on Azure Public Cloud for your reference that might be inconsistent with the actual deployment for Azure operated by 21Vianet.

Update (November 2024)

  • AVS assessments now support cost assessments with AV64 SKU and Azure NetApp Files (ANF) as an external storage option.

  • Support for cost of SKUs when porting on-premises VCF subscription to AVS.

  • Support for migrating Enterprise Linux machines (RHEL and SLES) in VMware and Hyper-V environments to Azure, leveraging Azure Hybrid benefit. Learn more.

  • Public Preview: Azure Migrate now supports creating a business case for Azure Arc and onboarding servers to Azure Arc from the Migrate inventory. Learn more .


Using these capabilities, you can visualize the value Azure Arc brings to your on-premises estate throughout the migration journey, enabling confident, informed decisions. You can also check if your on-premises servers are already Arc-enabled and, if not, generate an Azure Arc onboarding script to deploy at scale using automation tools for the servers you choose to enable.

Update (October 2024)

The RVTools XLSX (preview) file import now reads storage data, when available, from vPartition and vMemory (for storage required for unreserved memory) sheets. Learn more .

Update (April 2024)

  • Movere: Movere service has been retired on 1st March 2024. Users are requested to use Azure Migrate for the discovery and assessment of on-premises workloads.

  • Public preview: Azure Migrate now supports discovery and assessment of SAP Systems. Using this capability, you can now perform import-based assessments for your on-premises SAP inventory and workloads.

  • Public Preview: You now have the capability to assess your Java (Tomcat) web apps to both Azure App Service and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).

Update (March 2024)

  • Public preview: Spring Boot Apps discovery and assessment is now available using Packaged solution to deploy Kubernetes appliance.

Update (February 2024)

  • Public preview: Envision savings with Azure Hybrid Benefits by bringing your existing Enterprise Linux subscriptions (RHEL and SLES) to Azure using Azure VM assessments and business case.

Update (January 2024)

  • Public preview: Using the RVTools XLSX, you can import an on-premises VMware environment's servers' configuration data into Azure Migrate and create a quick business case and also assess the cost of hosting these workloads on Azure and/or Azure VMware Solution (AVS) environments. Learn more.

Update (December 2023)

  • Envision cost savings from Azure Management Services (Azure Backup, Azure Monitor, and Azure Update Manager) using Azure Migrate Business case.

Update (November 2023)

  • Public Preview: Assess your ASP.NET web apps for migration to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Using this feature, you get insights such as app readiness, cluster rightsizing and cost of running these web apps on AKS.

  • Public Preview: Assess your ASP.NET web apps for migration to Azure App Service Containers.

  • Public Preview: Get the total cost of ownership (TCO) comparison for your ASP.NET web apps running on AKS and App Service Containers in Azure Migrate Business Case.

Update (September 2023)

  • Azure Migrate now supports discovery and assessment of Spring Boot apps using the Azure Migrate: Discovery and assessment tool. Learn more .

Update (August 2023)

  • Azure Migrate now helps you gain deeper insights into the support posture of your IT estate by providing insights into Windows server and SQL Server license support information. You can stay ahead of license support deadlines with Support ends in information that helps to understand the time left until the end of support for respective servers and databases.
  • Azure Migrate also provides clear guidance regarding actionable steps that can be taken to secure servers and databases in extended support or out of support.
  • Envision Extended Security Update (ESU) savings for out of support Windows Server and SQL Server licenses using Azure Migrate Business case.

Update (July 2023)

  • Discover Azure Migrate from Operations Manager console: Operations Manager 2019 UR3 and later allows you to discover Azure Migrate from console. You can now generate a complete inventory of your on-premises environment without appliance. This can be used in Azure Migrate to assess machines at scale. Learn more.
  • Public Preview: Upgrade your Windows OS during Migration using the Azure Migrate and Server Migration tool in your VMware environment. Learn more.

Update (June 2023)

  • Envision security cost savings with Microsoft Defender for Cloud (MDC) using Azure Migrate business case.
  • Resolve issues impacting the performance data collection and accuracy of Azure VM and Azure VMware Solution assessment recommendation and improve the confidence ratings of assessments. Learn more.

Update (May 2023)

  • SQL Server discovery and assessment in Azure Migrate is now Generally Available (GA).

Update (April 2023)

  • Build a quick business case for servers imported via a .csv file. Learn more.
  • Build business case using Azure Migrate for:
    • Servers and workloads running in your Microsoft Hyper-V and Physical/ Bare-metal environments as well as IaaS services of other public cloud.
    • SQL Server Always On Failover Cluster Instances and Always On Availability Groups. Learn more.
  • Envision savings with Azure Hybrid Benefits by bringing your existing Windows Server licenses to Azure using Azure VM assessments.

Update (March 2023)

  • Support for discovery and assessment of web apps for Azure app service for Hyper-V and Physical servers.

Update (February 2023)

  • Discovery and assessment of SQL Server Always On Failover Cluster Instances and Always On Availability Groups is now supported. Learn more.
  • Public Preview: Modernize your ASP.NET web apps onto Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) directly through Azure Migrate.

Update (January 2023)

  • Envision savings with Azure Savings Plan for compute (ASP) savings option with Azure Migrate business case and assessments. ASP as a savings option assumption/setting is now available for business case, Azure VM assessment, Azure SQL assessment, and Azure App Service assessment.

  • Support for export of business case report into an .xlsx workbook from the portal.

  • Azure Migrate is now supported in Sweden geography.

Update (December 2022)

  • General Availability: Perform software inventory and agentless dependency analysis at-scale for Hyper-V virtual machines and bare metal servers or servers running on other clouds like AWS, GCP etc. Learn more on how to perform software inventory and agentless dependency analysis.

  • Public Preview: Build business case using Azure Migrate for servers and workloads running in your VMware environment. It helps you eliminate guess work in your cost planning process and adds data driven insights to understand how Azure can bring the most value to your business.

    Key highlights:

    • On-premises vs Azure total cost of ownership.
    • Year on year cashflow analysis.
    • Resource utilization based insights to identify servers and workloads that are ideal for cloud.
    • Quick wins for migration and modernization including end of support Windows OS and SQL versions.
    • Long term cost savings by moving from a capital expenditure model to an Operating expenditure model, by paying for only what you use.

  • General availability: Discover, assess, and migrate servers over a private network using Azure Private Link. Learn more.

Update (November 2022)

  • Support for providing a sudo user account to perform agentless dependency analysis on Linux servers running in VMware, Hyper-V, and Physical/other cloud environments.
  • Support for selecting VNet and Subnet during test migration using PowerShell for agentless VMware scenario.
  • Support for OS disk swap using the Azure portal and PowerShell for agentless VMware scenario.
  • Support for pausing and resuming replications using PowerShell for agentless VMware scenario.

Update (October 2022)

  • Support for export of errors and notifications from the portal for software inventory and agentless dependency. Learn more

Update (September 2022)

  • Support for pausing and resuming ongoing replications without having to do a complete replication again. You can also retry VM migrations without the need to do a full initial replication again.
  • Enhanced notifications for test migration and migration completion status.
  • Java web apps discovery on Apache Tomcat running on Linux servers hosted in VMware environment.
  • Enhanced discovery data collection including detection of database connecting strings, application directories, and authentication mechanisms for ASP.NET web apps.
  • General availability: Discover, assess, and migrate servers over a private network using Azure Private Link. Learn more.

Update (August 2022)

  • SQL discovery and assessment for Microsoft Hyper-V and Physical/ Bare-metal environments as well as IaaS services of other public cloud.

Update (June 2022)

  • Perform at-scale agentless migration of ASP.NET web apps running on IIS web servers hosted on a Windows OS in a VMware environment.

Update (May 2022)

  • Upgraded the Azure SQL assessment experience to identify the ideal migration target for your SQL deployments across Azure SQL MI, SQL Server on Azure VM, and Azure SQL DB:
    • We recommended migrating instances to SQL Server on Azure VM as per the Azure best practices.
    • Right sized Lift and Shift - Server to SQL Server on Azure VM. We recommend this when SQL Server credentials aren't available.
    • Enhanced user-experience that covers readiness and cost estimates for multiple migration targets for SQL deployments in one assessment.
  • Support for Storage vMotion during replication for agentless VMware VM migrations.

Update (March 2022)

  • Perform agentless VMware VM discovery, assessments, and migrations over a private network using Azure Private Link. Learn more.
  • General Availability: Support to select subnets for each Network Interface Card of a replicating virtual machine in VMware agentless migration scenario.

Update (February 2022)

  • General Availability: Migrate Windows and Linux Hyper-V virtual machines with large data disks (up to 32 TB in size).
  • Azure Migrate is now supported in Azure operated by 21Vianet. Learn more.
  • Public preview of at-scale, software inventory, and agentless dependency analysis for Hyper-V virtual machines and bare metal servers or servers running on other clouds like AWS, GCP etc.

Update (December 2021)

  • Support to discover, assess, and migrate VMs from multiple vCenter Servers using a single Azure Migrate appliance. Learn more.

  • Simplified Azure VMware Solution assessment experience to understand sizing assumptions, resource utilization, and limiting factor for migrating on-premises VMware VMs to Azure VMware Solution. Other enhancements added:

    • Support for two new target assessment regions: Central US and Canada East
    • Support for Reserved Instances in assessment properties for more accurate cost estimates
    • New readiness condition to highlight Operating Systems deprecated by VMware
    • Support for storage utilization parameter in storage sizing logic (only for discovery via a .csv file)

Update (October 2021)

  • Azure Migrate now supports new public cloud geographies and regions. Learn more.

Update (September 2021)

  • Discover, assess, and migrate servers over a private network using Azure Private Link. is now in preview in supported government cloud geographies. Learn more
  • Support to tag and add custom names to resources for agentless VMware VM migrations using PowerShell.
  • Azure Migrate appliance: Option to remove servers from the physical servers discovery list.

Update (August 2021)

  • At-scale discovery and assessment of ASP.NET web apps running on IIS servers in your VMware environment, is now in preview. Refer to the Discovery and assessment tutorials to get started.

  • Support for Azure ultra disks in Azure VM assessment recommendation.

  • General Availability of at-scale, software inventory, and agentless dependency analysis for VMware virtual machines.

  • Azure Migrate appliance updates:

    • "Diagnose and solve" on appliance to help users identify and self-assess any issues with the appliance.
    • Unified installer script- common script where users need to select from the scenario, cloud, and connectivity options to deploy an appliance with the desired configuration.
    • Support to add a user account with 'sudo' access on appliance configuration manager to perform discovery of Linux servers (as an alternative to providing root account or enabling setcap permissions).
    • Support to edit the SQL Server connection properties on the appliance configuration manager.

Update (July 2021)

  • Azure Migrate: App Containerization tool now lets you package applications running on servers into a container image and deploy the containerized application to Azure App Service containers, in addition to Azure Kubernetes Service. You can also automatically integrate application monitoring for Java apps with Azure Application Insights and use Azure Key Vault to manage application secrets such as certificates and parameterized configurations.

Update (June 2021)

  • Azure Migrate now supports new public cloud geographies and regions. Learn more
  • Azure Migrate allows you to register servers running SQL server with SQL VM RP during replication to automatically install SQL IaaS Agent Extension. This feature is available for agentless VMware, agentless Hyper-V, and agent-based migrations.
  • Import CSV file for assessment now supports up to 20 disks. Earlier it was limited to eight disks per server.

Update (May 2021)

  • Migration of VMs and physical servers with OS disks up to 4 TB is now supported using the agent-based migration method.

Update (March 2021)

  • Support to provide multiple server credentials on Azure Migrate appliance to discover installed applications (software inventory), agentless dependency analysis and discover SQL Server instances and databases in your VMware environment. Learn more

  • Discovery and assessment of SQL Server instances and databases running in your VMware environment is now in preview. Refer to the Discovery and assessment tutorials to get started.

  • Agentless VMware migration now supports concurrent replication of 500 VMs per vCenter.

  • Azure Migrate: App Containerization tool now lets you package applications running on servers into a container image and deploy the containerized application to Azure Kubernetes Service.

Update (January 2021)

  • Azure Migrate and Server Migration tool now lets you migrate VMware virtual machines, physical servers, and virtual machines from other clouds to Azure virtual machines with disks encrypted with server-side encryption with customer-managed keys (CMK).

Update (December 2020)

  • Azure Migrate now automatically installs the Azure VM agent on the VMware VMs while migrating them to Azure using the agentless method of VMware migration. (Windows Server 2008 R2 and later)
  • Migration of VMware VMs to Azure virtual machines with disks encrypted using server-side encryption (SSE) with customer-managed keys (CMK), using the Azure Migrate and Server Migration (agentless replication) tool is now available through the Azure portal.

Update (September 2020)

  • Migration of servers to Availability Zones is now supported.
  • Migration of UEFI-based VMs and physical servers to Azure generation 2 VMs is now supported. With this release, Azure Migrate and Server Migration tool won't perform the conversion from Gen 2 VM to Gen 1 VM during migration.
  • A new Azure Migrate Power BI assessment dashboard is available to help you compare costs across different assessment settings. The dashboard comes with a PowerShell utility that automatically creates the assessments that plug into the Power BI dashboard. Learn more.
  • Dependency analysis (agentless) can now be run concurrently on a 1,000 VMs.
  • Dependency analysis (agentless) can now be enabled or disabled at scale using PowerShell scripts. Learn more.
  • Visualize network connections in Power BI using the data collected using dependency analysis (agentless) Learn more.
  • Migration of VMware VMs with data disk size of up to 32 TB is now supported using the Azure Migrate and Server Migration agentless VMware migration method.

Update (August 2020)

  • Improved onboarding experience where an Azure Migrate project key is generated from the portal and is used to complete the appliance registration.
  • Option to download either OVA/VHD files or the installer scripts from the portal to set up the VMware and Hyper-V appliances respectively.
  • Refreshed appliance configuration manager with enhanced user experience.
  • Multiple credentials support for Hyper-V VMs discovery.

Update (July 2020)

  • Agentless VMware migration now supports concurrent replication of 300 VMs per vCenter.

Update (June 2020)

  • Assessments for migrating on-premises VMware VMs to Azure VMware Solution (AVS) are now supported.

  • Support for multiple credentials on appliance for physical server discovery.

  • Support to allow Azure sign-in from appliance for tenant where tenant restriction has been configured.

Update (April 2020)

Azure Migrate supports deployments in Azure Government.

Update (March 2020)

A script-based installation is now available to set up the Azure Migrate appliance:

  • The script-based installation is an alternative to the .OVA (VMware)/VHD (Hyper-V) installation of the appliance.
  • It provides a PowerShell installer script that can be used to set up the appliance for VMware/Hyper-V on an existing machine running Windows Server 2016.

Update (November 2019)

Many new features were added to Azure Migrate:

  • Physical server assessment. Assessment of on-premises physical servers is now supported, in addition to physical server migration that is already supported.
  • Import-based assessment. Assessment of machines using metadata and performance data provided in a CSV file is now supported.
  • Application discovery: Azure Migrate now supports application-level discovery of apps, roles, and features using the Azure Migrate appliance. This is currently supported for VMware VMs only, and is limited to discovery only (assessment isn't currently supported). Learn more
  • Agentless dependency visualization: You no longer need to explicitly install agents for dependency visualization. Both agentless and agent-based are now supported.
  • Virtual Desktop: Use ISV tools to assess and migrate on-premises virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) to Windows Virtual Desktop in Azure.
  • Web app: The Azure App Service Migration Assistant, used for assessing and migration web apps, is now integrated into Azure Migrate.

New assessment and migration tools were added to Azure Migrate:

  • RackWare: Offering cloud migration.
  • Movere: Offering assessment.

Learn more about using tools and ISV offerings for assessment and migration in Azure Migrate.

Azure Migrate current version

The current version of Azure Migrate (released in July 2019) provides many new features:

  • Unified migration platform: Azure Migrate now provides a single portal to centralize, manage, and track your migration journey to Azure, with an improved deployment flow and portal experience.
  • Assessment and migration tools: Azure Migrate provides native tools, and integrates with other Azure services, and with independent software vendor (ISV) tools. Learn more about ISV integration.
  • Azure Migrate assessment: Using the Azure Migrate Server Assessment tool, you can assess VMware VMs and Hyper-V VMs for migration to Azure. You can also assess for migration using other Azure services, and ISV tools.
  • Azure Migrate migration: Using the Azure Migrate and Server Migration tool, you can migrate on-premises VMware VMs and Hyper-V VMs to Azure, as well as physical servers, other virtualized servers, and private/public cloud VMs. In addition, you can migrate to Azure using ISV tools.
  • Azure Migrate appliance: Azure Migrate deploys a lightweight appliance for discovery and assessment of on-premises VMware VMs and Hyper-V VMs.
    • This appliance is used by Azure Migrate Server Assessment, and the Azure Migrate and Server Migration tool for agentless migration.
    • The appliance continuously discovers server metadata and performance data, for the purposes of assessment and migration.
  • VMware VM migration: The Azure Migrate and Server Migration tool provides a couple of methods for migrating on-premises VMware VMs to Azure. An agentless migration using the Azure Migrate appliance, and an agent-based migration that uses a replication appliance, and deploys an agent on each VM you want to migrate. Learn more.
  • Database assessment and migration: From Azure Migrate, you can assess on-premises databases for migration to Azure using the Azure Database Migration Assistant. You can migrate databases using the Azure Database Migration Service.
  • Web app migration: You can assess web apps using a public endpoint URL with the Azure App Service. For migration of internal .NET apps, you can download and run the App Service Migration Assistant.
  • Data Box: Import large amounts of offline data into Azure using Azure Data Box in Azure Migrate.

Azure Migrate previous version

If you're using the previous version of Azure Migrate (only assessment of on-premises VMware VMs was supported), you should now use the current version. In the previous version, you can no longer create new Azure Migrate projects, or perform new discoveries. You can still access existing projects. To do this in the Azure portal, go to All services, search for Azure Migrate. In the Azure Migrate notifications, there's a link to access old Azure Migrate projects.

Next steps