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Azure Migrate is a Microsoft service that helps an enterprise assess how its on-premises workloads will perform, and how much they will cost to host, in the Azure public cloud. While Azure Migrate helps with planning a cloud migration, it does not actually transfer on-premises virtual machines (VMs) to the Azure cloud. For this, Microsoft suggests using either its Azure Site Recovery or Azure Database Migration service.

Azure Migrate capabilities

An enterprise can use Azure Migrate to discover information about the VMware VMs running within its own data center, including CPU and memory usage, as well as performance history. As part of the discovery process, Azure Migrate can also perform dependency mapping to help an enterprise visualize the resource dependencies of a single or group of VMs. To get started, an organization needs to create an Azure Migrate project via the Azure portal. Then, it needs to download an Open Virtualization Appliance (.ova) file and import it as a VM, called the "Collector Appliance," that runs on its on-premises vCenter Server. That VM then collects metadata about other on-premises VMs and feeds that information to the Azure Migrate service. While the use of this Collector Appliance does not require the installation of any agents, a user does need to install agents on premises in order to enable the dependency mapping features mentioned above. Based on the metadata collected during the discovery process, Azure Migrate then helps an enterprise determine the type and size of VM in the Azure public cloud that would offer the best performance for their on-premises workloads. It also helps an enterprise estimate how much it would cost, on a monthly basis, to run those workloads on Azure. 

There are multiple tools which help you to do Azure Data migration. These include Azure Storage Explorer which has an easy to use graphical user interface to command line tools such as AZCopy, Azure Powershell, and the Azure CLI.

1 – Azure Storage Explorer

Azure Storage Explorer allows you to easily manage your Azure storage accounts via an installed client-side application which runs on Windows, MacOS, and Linux.Migrating data with Azure Storage Explorer is as simple as copy and pasting files into a standard operating system file system manager. Naturally, the larger the size of the data and the speed of the network will impact how long it will take to copy data from the source location to your Azure storage account subscription.

Command Line Tools for migrating unstructured data

2 – AzCopy

AzCopy is a command line utility built specifically to aid users in copying data from external sources to Azure storage. Also, AzCopy also lets you copy data from one Azure storage account to another and even copy data across subscriptions. This command line utility, which in essence is the stripped-down copy functionality from Azure Storage Explorer, is available for both Microsoft and Linux platforms. To use this utility, you will need some familiarity with command line syntax which makes it a little less simple to use than Azure Storage Explorer. However, as it is a command line interface, it can be installed on systems which do not have a graphical user interface such as Windows Core, Windows Nano, and Linux servers.

3 – Azure PowerShell

PowerShell is a command line scripting language built by Microsoft which gives you the ability to interact with Microsoft technologies via a task-based interactive shell. Azure PowerShell is a set of PowerShell cmdlets created to communicate with Azure Resource Manager letting you manage Azure services via the command line. Azure PowerShell, like Azure Storage Explorer and AzCopy, allows you to manage the transfer of data to, from, and within Azure storage accounts. With Azure PowerShell, you can script an entire data migration by creating a storage account for copying and verifying the data.

I hope this information will be helpful!

Matt Henry