Free tool simplifies Azure migration between data centers

In yesterday's Microsoft Azure Blog, Guy Bowerman, Senior Program Manager, Azure Compute Runtime, highlighted the availability of a free, open source tool design to assist users in moving existing, deployed virtual machines from one Azure data center to another.

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The Azure Data Center Migration Solution (ADCMS) is designed to address common migration scenarios, such as moving to a closer data center with lower latency; deploying the same solution configuration to multiple data centers; or even moving between subscriptions, such as from an MSDN test account to a full production deployment.

The software was tested under a variety of different scenarios including:

• Migration of small (10 VMs, one VNet) to medium (100+ VMs, up to 10 VNets) IaaS deployments
• Migration between subscriptions in the same data center, between subscriptions in near data centers(same continent), and between subscriptions in data centers far apart (different continents)
• Migrations with variations in IaaS features: regional versus affinity-bound VNets, pure IaaS deployments versus mixed IaaS-platform as a service (PaaS) deployments, stand-alone VMs, VMs in subnets, single and multiple storage accounts, with or without availability sets, and more
• Compatibility with recently released features in IaaS, such as reserved IP, internal load balancer, and static internal IP
• Migrations where the exported JSON undergoes a number of name, configuration, binding, or other changes that make the destination deployment different from the source deployment
• Migration of a high-availability SharePoint farm

The appendix of the application user guide includes information on the performance of the migration in each of the scenarios, giving the user a ballpark idea how long their own migration might take. The automated migration also required the manual migration of Blobs related to the VMs being migrated, and the time required for that process is included in the performance analyses.

The complete open source product is available on github along with the comprehensive user manual. Microsoft, and developer Persistent Systems who created the tool along with the Microsoft Azure CAT team in Bangalore, India, expect that end users will be able to easily modify the source code to meet the needs of their specific project and requirements for the migration tool.