Migrate VMs to Azure Stack HCI

One question I get asked a lot is, how do I migrate Hyper-V or VMware VMs (virtual machines) to Azure Stack HCI. Now depending on your scenarios, you have a couple of different options. First of all, you can use software from a lot of different third-party vendors which provide create replication and migration tools. Many of them can be highly automated and scripted to make sure you have as little downtime as possible. If you are using a third-party backup software, I would also recommend that you check about restore options, since many vendors allow you to restore VMware VMs to Azure Stack HCI. The second option is to use our own Azure Migrate tool. This tool does now not only let you migrate workloads such as Linux or Windows VMs to Azure, but also to Azure Stack HCI.

Azure Migrate is a unified platform that simplifies migration, modernization, and optimization of on-premises resources to Azure and now also to Azure Stack HCI (in preview).

Migrate Hyper-V VMs to Azure Stack HCI with Azure Migrate

Migrate Hyper-V VMs to Azure Stack HCI is currently in public preview. With this feature, you can move your Windows and Linux VMs that run on Hyper-V to Azure Stack HCI, version 23H2 clusters (released as of Feb 1st of this year. You can migrate from various source environments starting from Hyper-V on Windows Server 2012 R2 to Windows Server 2022.

This feature uses the agentless migration option of Azure Migrate. This means that you don’t have to do any prep work such as installing an agent on the source VMs. You just need two appliances, one on the source and one on the target.

You can manage, monitor, and configure through the cloud (Azure Migrate), but the data transfer between the source and the target is local.

All the migrated VMs are Arc-enabled by default. This means that you can immediately use the full power of Arc VM management after the migration is done.

Migrate VMware VMs to Azure Stack HCI with Azure Migrate

Migrate VMware VMs to Azure Stack HCI is currently in private preview. Please fill this form if you would like to be part of the private preview and help us build a high-quality migration capability. 

Learn more and get started

For more information and detailed steps, please visit the Microsoft Learn and Tech Community:

• Announcement blog
• Options for migrating virtual machines to Azure Stack HCI (preview)
• Use Azure Migrate to move Hyper-V VMs to Azure Stack HCI (preview)

If you want to try out Azure Stack HCI or other Azure Adaptive cloud services such as Azure Arc, AKS, IoT, and more, check out the Arc Jumpstart.