New Azure Migrate and Azure Site Recovery enhancements for cloud migration

We are continuously enhancing our offerings to help you in your digital transformation journey to the cloud. You can read more about these offerings in the blog, “Three reasons why Windows Server and SQL Server customers continue to choose Azure.” In this blog, we will go over some of the new features added to Microsoft Azure Migrate and Azure Site Recovery that will help you in your lift and shift migration journey to Azure.

Azure Migrate

Azure Migrate allows you to discover your on-premises environment and plan your migration to Azure. Based on popular demand, we have now enabled Azure Migrate in two new geographies, Azure Government and Europe. Support for other Azure geographies will be enabled in future.

Below is the list of regions within the Azure geographies where the discovery and assessment metadata is stored.

When you create a migration project in the Azure portal, the region for metadata storage is randomly selected. For example, if you create a project in the United States, we will automatically select the region as West Central US or East US. If you are specific about storing the metadata in a certain region in the geography, you can use our REST APIs to create the migration project and can specify the region accordingly in the API request.

Note, the geography selection does not restrict you from planning your migration for other Azure target regions. Azure Migrate allows you to specify more than 30 Azure target regions for migration planning. You can learn more by visiting our documentation, “Customize an assessment.”

Azure Site Recovery

Azure Site Recovery (ASR) helps you migrate your on-premises virtual machines (VMs) to IaaS VMs in Azure, this is the lift and shift migration. We are listening to your feedback and have recently made enhancements in ASR to make your migration journey even more smooth. Below is the list of enhancements recently done in ASR:

• Support for physical servers with UEFI boot type: VMs with UEFI boot type are not supported in Azure. However, ASR allows you to migrate such on-premises Windows servers to Azure by converting the boot type of the on-premises servers to BIOS while migrating them. Previously, ASR supported conversion of boot type for only virtual machines. With the latest update, ASR now also supports migration of physical servers with UEFI boot type. The support is restricted to Windows machines only (Windows Server 2012 R2 and above).
• Linux disk support: Previously, ASR had certain restrictions regarding directories in Linux machines, it required the directories such as /(root), /boot, /usr, and more to be on the same OS disk of the VM in order to migrate it. Additionally, it did not support VMs that had /boot on an LVM volume and not on a disk partition. With the latest update, ASR now supports directories in different disks and also supports /boot on an LVM volume. This essentially means, ASR allows migration of Linux VMs with LVM managed OS and data disks, and directories on multiple disks. You can learn more by visiting our documentation, “Support matrix for disaster recovery of VMware VMs and physical servers to Azure.”
• Migration from anywhere: ASR helps you migrate any kind of server to Azure no matter where it runs, private cloud or public cloud. We are happy to announce that the guest OS coverage for AWS has now expanded, and ASR now supports the following operating systems for migration of AWS VMs to Azure.

We are listening and continuously enhancing these services. If you have any feedback or have any ideas, do use our UserVoice forums for Azure Migrate and ASR and let us know.

If you are new to these tools, get started at the Azure Migration Center. Make sure you also start your journey right by taking the free Assessing and Planning for Azure Migration course offered by Microsoft.