In the past of couple of years, Microsoft has improved Azure cloud services platform more than any other competitors in the space. As a result, they are now in the position where customers are looking to migrate their cloud solutions to Azure. To make the migration process easier, Microsoft has now announced the limited preview of Migration Accelerator (MA), for Azure. It is designed to seamlessly migrate physical, VMware, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Hyper-V workloads into Azure. It automates all aspects of migration including discovery of source workloads, remote agent installation and more.
MA changes the cloud migration paradigm by offering:
- Heterogeneity: With MA you can migrate workloads running on a broad range of platforms such as VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, Amazon Web Services and/or Physical servers within your environment. MA can support workloads running on Windows Server 2008 R2 sp1, Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2 operating systems.
- Simple, Automated Migration: The MA portal allows you to automatically discover your enterprise workloads, remotely from the cloud. With few clicks you can configure end-to-end migration scenarios. MA allows you to test your workload in the cloud without impacting the existing on premise production workload offering the ability to validate workload functionality before a cutover is performed.
- Migrate Multi-tier Applications: MA boasts the unique ability to migrate multi-tier production system with application level consistency orchestrated across tiers. This ensures multi-tier applications run the same in Azure, as they ran at the source. Application startup order is even honored, without the need for any manual configuration.
- Continuous Replication, Least Cutover Time: MA for Azure provides full-system replication including the OS and application data. This continuous replication and in-memory change tracking reduces the cutover time to mere minutes, minimizing impact to product workloads.
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