How to migrate from AWS to Azure using Azure Migrate

Today we're going to discuss how you can use Azure Migrate to get started migrating your AWS EC2 instances over to Azure. First, drop into the Azure portal, and then go to the search bar and find the Azure Migrate service. Once it comes up, create a migration project. Click on Servers. There are options in here for databases, VDI, other instances to migrate. Right now, we're just going to focus on servers, and then we're going to create a project. Select a subscription, a resource group, and create a project for this and geography where you want to create it in.

Once that's available, we're going to set up our migration appliance. Now you will see you have options for assessments here and you have options for migrations here. You can use Azure Migrate: Server Assessment to deploy in your environment. It can look at your workloads, analyze them for best practices, over-provisioning and under-provisioning, recommend sizes and changes, and give you a pretty good, best-fit size of what the equivalent of that would look like in Azure. But we're just going to focus on migration today. Scroll down to server migration. Hit the Discover button. And then we have a little wizard here. In our case, we're going to select how they're virtualized and what we want to replicate. There are options for Hyper-V, VMware, and then basically everything else. I'm going to replicate to East US. You can select other regions if you need to. This takes a few seconds to deploy.

Once that's completed its deployment, when you go back to Azure migrate, it changes just slightly. Once again, we'll go into servers, go back down to our discover. Now our wizard has changed a bit, it's going to say 'Do you want to change your appliance type?' The first time you're going to do this, you're going to install a replica appliance. If in the future, you have a large-scale deployment -- you're migrating a lot of machines -- you can actually scale these appliances out as needed. There are two things in this wizard that you need. First is the appliance software itself that you need to download. And the second one is the registration key. That is the vault credentials that is used for Azure Migrate. In the back end, it's using Azure Site Recovery, so this is the credentials to the vault for that. Download these.

We're going to launch the executable. We'll just run through this wizard. First time installation, install and configure this process server. Like I said, if you need a scale out, and that's an option for later. Software License Agreement -- grab your migrate key-vault that you downloaded from the previous step, like it was in the portal. Proxy, if you need one; in this case, I don't. And then we'll go ahead and let this run through its checks.

Anything that's a warning isn't necessarily a big issue. As long as you don't have a failed, you're good. In this case, I've got warnings for CPU and memory. This appliance does do a lot of heavy lifting. The more servers you have and the larger they are, the more kind of work you're going to need here. So this is a pretty beefy VM for recommendation on here, just for processing the management of these things. And then of course, disk base on here, recommend 600 GB minimum, because of all that data transfer you have. Keep that in mind on your deployments. This will work for us, go ahead and click Next. Create some credentials for MySQL. Typically, VMware is the big reason this is used, in this case we'll hit no. Default location for installation. Next, view, everything looks good. Hit install. Depending on the size of your VM, this installation will take a few minutes. Go ahead and take break, get a coffee, and we'll come back when the install is done.

Installation's done. You're going to get this passphrase. Make sure you save this for use when you configure the machines you're going to migrate to Azure -- put this in a safe location. For the sake of this demo, I'm just going to put it in a text file. Once that wizard starts, you're going to have a page come up with the Site Recovery Configuration Server. First thing we need to do is create an account here. This is the account that will be used to communicate to the servers in the environment. I will point out it does say vCenter here; this is not specific to the vCenter. This is also just for other server configurations. Typically, in a production environment, you'd use your domain here, but in this demo, I'm going to go ahead and use the local admin account.

Once we've done that, we're going to hop back over to the Azure portal, go back to our servers config, back to discover. And now that we've done that registration, we should be able to select configuration server here. Select the name of the server that we just installed with the appliance software on and finalize that registration. Let this run for a few minutes. A few minutes later, registration should come up as finished and finalized. Go back to Azure migrate. Hit the Overview button. This gives you information about the overall status of things that are going on in your environment. Click on Infrastructure servers. You should see now that that server is connected and it's available and ready to go.

The next thing you want to do is go to your program data, ASR home SV systems, push install SVC repository, and then this repository has all the files that you need to actually configure the replication agent on the servers you want to migrate. In this case, we'll be migrating a Windows box. I'm going to grab this Windows executable and copy that over to the virtual machine. We're going to launch that agent file, then we're going to install a mobility service to its default location, it will just take a few minutes.

Once that's finished, go ahead and proceed to configuration. And then put in the information for your replication appliance. Make sure you can talk to that. If you have issues, Port 443 and Port 9443 need to be open from the VM that you're going to migrate to the appliance. Check your networking rules there if you're having issues.

With that done, we'll hop back to the portal. Once again, we're going to go to our migrations tool. Go to our overview pane. Now you see you have step one, two and three. So, replicate your virtual machine into the cloud, perform a test migration and do a final migration. First off, let's get that replicated. Select your AWS option, select the name of the appliance, those credentials that we created earlier are going to be in there. As I said earlier, you could have an assessment that you pull in data from, in this case we're not. And then you could see the name of that virtual machine you've just registered. If you come in here immediately after, it may or may not be there. Sometimes it does take two or three minutes for this to show up. But we see it's there now, so select it.

Now we're going to determine what our target settings are. When you created this migration project, you chose your regions, so that's the only option you have here. Select what vnet we want to put this in -- you do have to have this in place beforehand, you cannot create a vnet through this wizard. Once that looks good, ready to go, if you have Azure Hybrid Benefit, you can enable that here.

The wizard will automatically try to select a matching configuration for you based upon whatever the virtual machine or wherever the EC2 two instance was in AWS. If you would like to change it here, though, you can go ahead and pick a drop-down, upscale or downscale that instance, in Azure. In this case, I'm going to leave it to automatically configure. If you need to change disks, it's the same thing. Review and make sure you're in the right vnet, right resource group, and replicate. This will start a new deployment to create a replication process. Publication does take a while. Depending on the size of your virtual machine, the workload it's under, the workload and size of the appliance you would put in place, replication can take anywhere from a few minutes to days, depending on that data size.

Once that's completed its deployment, you can go to replicating machines in the assessment. You'll see that there's a machine there that is currently enabling protection, so it's going through that onboarding process. If you select the name of that machine, you can get health and detailed information about it -- currently, it's enabling protection, that it's healthy, that we've never done a test, where it's going, its size, any events that have occurred to it -- information like that. So we'll let this replicate and come back when it's ready for a failover.

A couple of hours have passed, our machine now shows up as a protected status in the portal. When we go and click on that, look at some details. On this page, it'll give us information on status, any error logs, we need to look at anything that's gone wrong or weird on here. We can look at that information here. In our case, we're going to complete a migration. Once again, in a testing or production situation, you likely would want to go through a test migration here first. But we'll select migrate.

It's going to ask if you want to shut down the virtual machine. In AWS, it does not have the ability to shut down that VM. You should do that ahead of time. I already have. Go ahead and hit the Migrate button. And let's start migration in progress. In this case, we've shut down the machine, it'll do a final data sync. So, a delta of whatever it has, since the last time it did a sync to make sure it has everything. Then, you shut the machine down and it'll bring up your other one for you automatically in a few moments.

A few minutes later, we can look at the job status to see if that failover was successful. If we go to the virtual machines in our subscription, we'll see that VM is now running in the environment, ready to go for you to continue on those workloads.

I hope you found this useful and helpful on how to migrate your AWS EC2 instances over to Azure, or virtual machines. And good luck with your migrations.