Azure Migrate: Common questions

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This article answers common questions about Azure Migrate. If you have questions after you read this article, you can post them in the Azure Migrate forum. You also can review these articles:

What is Azure Migrate?

Azure Migrate provides a central hub to track discovery, assessment, and migration of your on-premises apps and workloads and private and public cloud VMs to Azure. The hub provides Azure Migrate tools for assessment and migration and third-party ISV offerings. Learn more.

What can I do with Azure Migrate?

Use Azure Migrate to discover, assess, and migrate on-premises infrastructure, applications, and data to Azure. Azure Migrate supports assessment and migration of on-premises VMware VMs, Hyper-V VMs, physical servers, other virtualized VMs, databases, web apps, and virtual desktops.

What's the difference between Azure Migrate and Azure Site Recovery?

Azure Migrate provides a centralized hub for assessment and migration to Azure.

  • Using Azure Migrate provides interoperability and future extensibility with Azure Migrate tools, other Azure services, and third-party tools.
  • The Azure Migrate and Server Migration tool is purpose-built for server migration to Azure. It's optimized for migration. You don't need to learn about concepts and scenarios that aren't directly relevant to migration.
  • There are no tool usage charges for migration for 180 days from the time replication is started for a VM. It gives you time to complete migration. You only pay for the storage and network resources used in replication, and for compute charges consumed during test migrations.
  • Azure Migrate supports all migration scenarios supported by Site Recovery. Also, for VMware VMs, Azure Migrate provides an agentless migration option.
  • We're prioritizing new migration features for the Azure Migrate and Server Migration tool only. These features aren't targeted for Site Recovery.

Azure Site Recovery should be used for disaster recovery only.

The Azure Migrate and Server Migration tool uses some back-end Site Recovery functionality for lift-and-shift migration of some on-premises machines.

I have a project with the previous classic experience of Azure Migrate. How do I start using the new version?

Classic Azure Migrate is retiring in Feb 2024. After Feb 2024, classic version of Azure Migrate will no longer be supported, and the inventory metadata in the classic project will be deleted. You can't upgrade projects or components in the previous version to the new version. You need to create a new Azure Migrate project, and add assessment and migration tools to it. Use the tutorials to understand how to use the assessment and migration tools available. If you had a Log Analytics workspace attached to a classic project, you can attach it to a project of current version after you delete the classic project.

What's the difference between Azure Migrate: Discovery and assessment and the MAP Toolkit?

Server Assessment provides assessment to help with migration readiness, and evaluation of workloads for migration to Azure. The Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit helps with other tasks, including migration planning for newer versions of Windows client and server operating systems, and software usage tracking. For these scenarios, continue to use the MAP Toolkit.

What's the difference between Server Assessment and the Site Recovery Deployment Planner?

Server Assessment is a migration planning tool. The Site Recovery Deployment Planner is a disaster recovery planning tool.

Choose your tool based on what you want to do:

  • Plan on-premises migration to Azure: If you plan to migrate your on-premises servers to Azure, use Server Assessment for migration planning. Server Assessment assesses on-premises workloads and provides guidance and tools to help you migrate. After the migration plan is in place, you can use tools like the Azure Migrate and Server Migration tool to migrate the machines to Azure.
  • Plan disaster recovery to Azure: If you plan to set up disaster recovery from on-premises to Azure with Site Recovery, use the Site Recovery Deployment Planner. The Deployment Planner provides a deep, Site Recovery-specific assessment of your on-premises environment for disaster recovery. It provides recommendations related to disaster recovery, such as replication and failover.

How does the Azure Migrate and Server Migration tool work with Site Recovery?

  • If you use the Azure Migrate and Server Migration tool to perform an agentless migration of on-premises VMware VMs, migration is native to Azure Migrate and Site Recovery isn't used.
  • If you use the Azure Migrate and Server Migration tool to perform an agent-based migration of VMware VMs, or if you migrate Hyper-V VMs or physical servers, the Azure Migrate and Server Migration tool uses the Azure Site Recovery replication engine.

Which geographies are supported?

Review the supported geographies for Azure operated by 21Vianet.

What does Azure Migrate do to ensure data residency?

When you create a project, you select a geography of your choice. The project and related resources are created in one of the regions in the geography, as allocated by the Azure Migrate service. See the metadata storage locations for each geography here.

Azure Migrate doesn't move or store customer data outside of the region allocated, guaranteeing data residency and resiliency in the same geography.

Azure Migrate provides an additional option for creating projects and ensuring data residency in preferred regions beyond the specified geographies. To avail this option, use the link - https://aka.ms/migrate/ProjectRegionSelection.

Does Azure Migrate offer Backup and Disaster Recovery?

Azure Migrate is classified as customer managed Disaster Recovery, which means Azure Migrate doesn't offer to recover data from an alternate region and offer it to customers when the project region isn't available.

While using different capabilities, it's recommended that you export the software inventory, dependency analysis, and assessment report for an offline backup.

In the event of a regional failure or outage in the Azure region that your project is created in:

  • You might not be able to access your Azure Migrate projects, assessments, and other reports during the outage. However, you can use the offline copies that you exported.
  • Any in-progress replication and/or migration are paused and you might have to restart it post the outage.

How do I delete a project?

Learn how to delete a project.

Can an Azure Migrate resource be moved?

No, Azure Migrate doesn't support moving resources. To move resources created by Azure Migrate, consider creating a new project in the desired region.

Next steps

Read the Azure Migrate overview.