Azure Migrate: Discovery and Assessment tool - Implementation Requirements

Re-hosting or “Lift and shift” using the Azure Migrate service is a migration strategy that allows quick and easy migration of on-premises servers, web apps and databases to the Azure cloud.  It is provided free with an Azure subscription and has become the leading choice for all Azure pre-migration steps including discovery, assessments, and right-sizing of workloads.

The service provides a centralised hub to track discovery, assessment, and migration of multiple workloads, including on-premises physical servers, VMware VMs, Hyper-V VMs, and VMs on other public cloud platforms such as AWS and GCP. Assessment provides options for sizing Azure target solutions and operational cost.

Azure Migrate: Database Migration supports migration of SQL server, Oracle, MySQL, PostgresQL, MongoDB workloads to SQL Server on Azure VM or Azure SQL Database or Azure SQL Managed Instance.

Azure Migrate: Web App Migration tool supports migration of Windows, .NET apps, Java apps & PHP apps to Azure App Service.

Discovery, Assessment and Migration requires installation of a lightweight appliance at your on-premises datacentre to do the initial discovery of servers, databases and web apps. The information gathered includes OS, CPU, memory, network, storage, software inventory, database instances, web app instances. The tool then assess suitability for migration to Azure with dependency mapping visualization of the running VMs.

This post outlines the requirements to deploy the Azure Migrate: Discovery and Assessment tool.

Implementation requirements

• Azure Subscription with Contributor access

• Azure Migrate Project workspace created within the Azure Portal to store discovery, assessment and migration metadata collected from source environment(s) with Project Key

• Administrator access to vCenter server, Hyper-V and any other server that is not domain joined or controlled by vCenter/HyperV that is part of the discovery and assessment

• Windows domain/non-domain, Linux, and SQL Server authentication credentials to perform software inventory, dependency analysis, discovery of SQL DBs – multiple server credentials can be entered

• Outbound connectivity on port 443(https) to Azure 

• Internet access availability from the installed Azure Migrate Appliances to Azure URLs :  Azure Migrate appliance - Azure Migrate | Microsoft Learn

• For software inventory on VMware servers, VMware Tools must be installed and running on your servers. The VMware Tools version must be version 10.2.1 or later.

• Windows servers with PowerShell version 2.0 or later installed

• WMI must be enabled and available on Windows servers to gather the details of the roles and features installed on the servers Separate appliances would need to be installed at each type of environment: VMware, Hyper-V and physical server (including Nutanix VMs). Each appliance once installed would need to be able to have network connectivity to discover servers as follows:

VMware appliance	Hyper-V appliance	Physical appliance
The appliance communicates with the vCenter server on TCP port 443.	The appliance communicates with the Hyper-V hosts on WinRM port 5985 (HTTP).	The appliance communicates with Windows servers over WinRM port 5985 (HTTP) with Linux servers over port 22 (TCP).

 The VMware and Hyper-V appliances are installed from templates and the physical appliance would require installation into a Windows Server 2019/2022 16-GB RAM, 8 vCPUs, around 80 GB of disk storage server.

• Download the following in preparation for the appliance install: 

Site	Appliance needed
For site with VMware vCenter server: Azure Migrate appliance (32 GB of RAM, 8 vCPUs, and approximately 80 GB of disk storage.)	Deploy VMware Appliance OVA template
For site with Hyper V- host download a Hyper-V Azure Migration appliance	Deploy Hyper-V Appliance VHD
For site containing physical servers have a VM of following spec: Windows Server 2019/2022 16-GB RAM, 8 vCPUs, around 80 GB of disk storage server.	Run Azure migrate installer script

Discovery

After an appliance is registered with Azure Migrate the server credentials are supplied for discovery of Windows and Linux servers. Discovered servers, databases and web apps will start to appear in the Azure portal after a few minutes and discovery of installed applications (software inventory) is initiated once discovery is complete. It can take 24 hours for a full software inventory.

During software inventory, the added server credentials are iterated against servers and validated for agentless dependency analysis.

Only the servers for which the server credentials validation succeeds can be selected to enable agentless dependency analysis. Network connection dependencies can be exported as .CSV file or can be visualised by clicking on view dependencies in the portal as shown below

The Clients groups lists the servers with a dependency on the selected server and the Ports group lists the servers that have a dependency from the selected server.