Introducing the new Azure Migrate: A hub for your migration needs

Moving on-premises apps and data to the cloud is a key step in our customers’ migration journey, and we’re committed to helping simplify that process. Earlier this year, we invited customers to participate in the preview of multiple new migration capabilities. Today, I am excited to announce the latest evolution of Azure Migrate, which provides a streamlined, comprehensive portfolio of Microsoft and partner tools to meet migration needs, all in one place.

With the general availability of Azure Migrate, including the new integrated partner experience, Server Assessment, Server Migration, Database Assessment, and Database Migration capabilities, we strive to make the cloud journey even easier for customers. Azure Migrate acts as a central hub for all migration needs and tools from infrastructure to applications to data. We are truly democratizing the migration process with guidance and choice.

New Azure Migrate integrated experience

The new experience provides you access to Microsoft and ISV tools and helps identify the right tool for your migration scenario. To help with large-scale datacenter migrations and cloud transformation projects, we’ve also added end-to-end progress tracking.

New features include:

◈ Guided experience for the most common migration scenarios such as server and database migration, data movement to Azure with Data Box, and migration of applications to Azure App Service

◈ Feature-based grouping and choice of Microsoft and partner tools for the typical phases of the migration process—discovery, assessment, and migration

◈ An integrated experience that ensures continuity and gives you a consistent view of your datacenter assets

Carbonite, Cloudamize, Corent, Device42, Turbonomic, and UnifyCloud are already integrated with Azure Migrate. 

Powerful Server Assessment and Server Migration capabilities

With our new Azure Migrate: Server Assessment service offering, in addition to discovery and assessment of VMware servers, you will now be able to:

◈ Perform large-scale VMware datacenter discovery and assessment for migration. Customers can now discover and assess 35,000 virtual machines (VMs). This is a tremendous scale improvement from the previous limit of 1,500 VMs.

◈ Perform large-scale Hyper-V datacenter discovery and assessment for migration. Customers can now profile Hyper-V hosts with up to 10,000 VMs. You can also bring all your inventory from VMware and Hyper-V in the same Azure Migrate project.

◈ Get performance-based rightsizing, application dependency analysis, migration cost planning, and readiness analysis for both VMware and Hyper-V. You don’t need any agents to perform discovery and assessment with Server Assessment.

Azure Migrate: Server Assessment is free to all Azure customers and will soon add support for physical server discovery and assessment.

Building on our current ability to perform migration of VMware, Hyper-V, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) virtual machines and physical servers to Azure, the new Azure Migrate: Server Migration enables:

◈ Agentless migration of VMware VMs to Azure in preview. When you opt to use the new agentless migration method for VMware VMs, you can use the same appliance for discovery, assessment, and migration. Onboard once and execute the entire process seamlessly. You also get OS-agnostic support to help you migrate any client or server OS, including Windows or Linux, that is supported on the Azure platform. This complements the generally available agent-based migration capability.

◈ Agentless migration of Hyper-V VMs to Azure and agent-based migration of physical servers and VMs running on Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud Platform to Azure.

◈ Simplified experience, similar to creating a virtual machine in Azure. The assessment recommendations automatically get applied to the VMs as you start migrating them, especially the rightsizing recommendations that help you optimize servers and save money. This feature works with assessments performed by Azure Migrate: Server Assessment or any integrated partners, such as Cloudamize and Turbonomic.

◈ No-impact migration testing that helps you plan your migration with confidence. You also get zero data loss when you move your applications to Azure.

Azure Migrate: Server Migration is free to all Azure customers. You only pay for the compute and storage that you consume in your Azure subscription.

Geographic availability

The Azure Migrate experience, including Server Assessment, Server Migration, and our integrated set of Microsoft and partner tools, are available starting today in United States, Europe, Asia, and the United Kingdom. You can start by creating an Azure Migrate project in a geography of your choice. We will ensure that metadata associated with your Microsoft and partner scenarios is retained in an Azure datacenter in the geography that you select. Later this month, customers will be able to create their Azure Migrate projects in Australia, Canada, and Japan. You can use a project in any geography to perform migrations to any Azure region of your choice.

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A flexible new way to purchase Azure SQL Database

We’re excited to announce the preview of an additional purchasing model to the Azure SQL Database Elastic Pool and Single Database deployment options. SQL Database Managed Instance, the vCore-based model reflects our commitment to customer choice by providing flexibility, control, and transparency. As with Managed Instance, the vCore-based model makes the Elastic Pool and Single Database options eligible for up to 30 percent savings* with the Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server.

Optimize flexibility and performance with two new service tiers

The new vCore-based model introduces two service tiers, General Purpose and Business Critical. These tiers let you independently define and control compute and storage configurations, and optimize them to exactly what your application requires.  If you’re considering a move to the cloud, the new model also provides a straightforward way to translate on-premises workload requirements to the cloud. General Purpose is designed for most business workloads and offers budget-oriented, balanced, and scalable compute and storage options. Business Critical is designed for business applications with high IO requirements and offers the highest resilience to failures.

Choosing between DTU and vCore-based performance levels

You want the freedom to choose what’s right for your workloads and we’re committed to supporting the DTU-based model alongside the new vCore-based option. Looking for a simple way to purchase and configure resources? The DTU-based model provides preconfigured bundles of resources across a range of performance options. If you are not concerned with customizing the underlying resources and prefer the simplicity of paying a fixed amount each month, you may find the DTU-based model more suitable for your needs. However, if you need more insights into the underlying resources or need to scale them independently to achieve optimal performance, the vCore-based model is the best choice. The vCore-based model is also a good choice if you own SQL Server licenses that you would like to move to the cloud. Migration between DTU-based and vCore-based performance levels is a simple online operation and is similar to the current process of upgrading from the Standard to Premium service tiers.

Save up to 30 percent* on vCore-based options with Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server

Save more on vCore-based options when you use the Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server. This benefit is exclusive to Azure and enables you to use your SQL Server Enterprise Edition or Standard Edition licenses with active Software Assurance to pay a reduced rate on a vCore-based Single Database, Elastic Pool or Managed Instance, with savings up to 30 percent.

Getting started!

The new vCore-based service tiers will be available in all Azure regions by April 6, 2018. If you already have an Azure SQL database, you can switch to the new service tiers in the portal and configure the database as illustrated by the following diagrams. Otherwise, you can create a new database in the General Purpose or Business Critical service tiers.

For more information about the vCore-based purchasing options visit our service tier documentation.

*Savings based on a 8 vCore Business Critical Managed Instance in East US Region, running 730 hours per month. Savings are calculated from full price (license included) against reduced price (applying Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server), which includes the Software Assurance cost for SQL Server Enterprise edition. Actual savings may vary based on region, performance tier, and Software Assurance tier.

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