News
        
        Microsoft's VMware-to-Azure VM Migration Tool Goes Live
        
        
        
			- By Kurt Mackie
- March 02, 2018
Organizations can now tap Microsoft's Azure Migrate tool to help migrate their on-premises virtual  machines (VMs) and applications to Azure datacenter infrastructure.
In preview since 2017, Azure Migrate became generally available on Wednesday. Currently, Azure Migrate can only assess VMware  workloads. Organizations can use it to discover "VMware-virtualized  Windows and Linux VMs today," Microsoft explained, though improvements to "enable discovery of Hyper-V  environments in the future" are in the works.
Users of the Azure Migrate tool have to create their VM migration  projects using the West Central U.S. and East U.S. Azure regions, but 30  "target regions" around the world are supported for VM move planning.  It seems that to actually move the VMs, organizations will need to use the Azure Site Recovery tool or the Azure  Database Migration Service, but Microsoft expects to add those migration  capabilities into Azure Migrate sometime in the future.
Azure Migrate is an agentless tool, but organizations optionally  can use an agent to provide information about whether multi-tier applications will  be able to run on Azure infrastructure. The agent also can be used to "rightsize"  Azure VMs for the move, as well as estimate the move's costs.
For this release, Microsoft added a feature to Azure Migrate  that lets organizations size their targeted VMs based on the current configuration,  such as the "number of CPU cores and size of memory." Microsoft also  eased matters so that organizations won't incur Service Map charges when viewing  multitier application network dependences using the tool. Azure Migrate also  now displays star icons to rate its assessments.
The pricing  for Azure Migrate is ambiguously described. Possibly, it's free to use for  the first 180 days, but it seems to have costs associated with the use of other  services, if they get used.
VMware Virtualization on Azure
In addition to the Azure Migrate planning tool, Microsoft  has a "VMware virtualization on Azure" tool, which was at the preview  stage back in November. It's designed to provide a "bare-metal VMware  stack" on Microsoft Azure infrastructure, as integrated by a VMware  partner. VMware had reacted sharply to that announcement, noting back then that  it wasn't consulted and does not support Microsoft's VMware virtualization on  Azure solution.
Microsoft' announcement this week didn't mention any details  about the status of the VMware virtualization on Azure tool.
Ubuntu Linux VM Plans
In related Windows news, Microsoft is currently working with  Canonical to improve Windows hosting of the Ubuntu operating system in a VM.  The intent is to afford Ubuntu VMs the same quality experience that hosted Windows  VMs have via an "enhanced session mode." To that end, Microsoft indicated  it was collaborating with the  XRDP open source project, whose team had helped implement the Microsoft  Remote Desktop Protocol on Linux, according to a  Wednesday announcement.
Expected improvements from the collaborations include a  "better mouse experience," an "integrated clipboard," "Windows  resizing" and "drive redirection" for hosted Ubuntu VMs. The  improvements are targeted to the release of Ubuntu version 18.04, code-named  "Bionic Beaver," which is expected to arrive "at the end of  April." When available, it'll be possible for users to get the enhanced Ubuntu  VMs from Hyper-V's "Quick Create VM gallery." 
Microsoft's announcement noted that the improved Ubuntu VM hosting  capability can be tested now in an early form using Ubuntu version 16.04 and  Windows Insider build 17063.
        
        
        
        
        
        
        
        
        
        
        
        
            
        
        
                
                    About the Author
                    
                
                    
                    Kurt Mackie is senior news producer for 1105 Media's Converge360 group.