Microsoft last week announced a limited preview of Migration Accelerator (MA) for Azure. MA can seamlessly migrate physical, VMware, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Hyper-V workloads into Azure, automating discovery of source workloads, remote agent installation, network adaptation and endpoint configuration. MA is based on the technology which Microsoft received when it acquired InMage in July this year.
MA works as follows:
- Mobility Service: A light weight (guest based) centrally deployed agent which gets installed on source servers (on-premises physical or virtual) to be migrated to the target virtual machines on Azure. It is responsible for real time data capture and synchronization of the selected volumes of source servers to target servers.
- Process Server (PS): A physical or virtual server that is installed on premise. It facilitates the communication between the Mobility Service and target virtual machines in Azure. It provides caching, queuing, compression, encryption and bandwidth management.
- Master Target (MT): A target for replicating disks of on premises servers. It is installed within a dedicated Azure VM in your Azure subscription. Disks are attached to the MT to maintain duplicate copies.
- Configuration Server (CS): Manages the communication between the Master Target and the MA Portal. It is installed on a dedicated Azure VM in your Azure subscription. Regular synchronization occurs between the CS and MA Portal.
- MA Portal: A multitenant portal to discover, configure protection and migrate your on premise workloads into Azure.
You can use the Microsoft Migration Accelerator link to sign-up for the preview.