Azure Migrate appliance

• 11/19/2019
• 11 minutes to read
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This article describes the Azure Migrate appliance. You deploy the appliance when you use Azure Migrate: Server Assessment tool to discover and assess apps, infrastructure, and workloads for migration to Microsoft Azure. The appliance is also used when you migrate VMware VMs to Azure using Azure Migrate: Server Assessment with agentless migration.

Appliance overview

The Azure Migrate appliance is used in the following scenarios.

Appliance - VMware

Appliance - Hyper-V

Appliance - Physical

URL access

The Azure Migrate appliance needs connectivity to the internet.

• When you deploy the appliance, Azure Migrate does a connectivity check to the URLs summarized in the table below.
• If you're using a URL-based proxy to connect to the internet, allow access to these URLs, making sure that the proxy resolves any CNAME records received while looking up the URLs.

Collected data - VMware

Collected performance data-VMware

Here's the VMware VM performance data that the appliance collects and sends to Azure.

Collected metadata-VMware

Here's the full list of VMware VM metadata that the appliance collects and sends to Azure.

Collected data - Hyper-V

Collected performance data-Hyper-V

Here's the Hyper VM performance data that the appliance collects and sends to Azure.

• CPU utilization is the sum of all usage, for all virtual processors attached to a VM.
• Memory utilization is (Current Pressure * Guest Visible Physical Memory) / 100.
• Disk and network utilization values are collected from the listed Hyper-V performance counters.

Collected metadata-Hyper-V

Here's the full list of Hyper-V VM metadata that the appliance collects and sends to Azure.

Discovery and collection process

The appliance communicates with vCenter Servers and Hyper-V hosts/cluster using the following process.

1. Start discovery:
   • When you start the discovery on the Hyper-V appliance, it communicates with the Hyper-V hosts on WinRM ports 5985 (HTTP) and 5986 (HTTPS).
   • When you start discovery on the VMware appliance, it communicates with the vCenter server on TCP port 443 by default. IF the vCenter server listens on a different port, you can configure it in the appliance web app.
2. Gather metadata and performance data:
   • The appliance uses a Common Information Model (CIM) session to gather Hyper-V VM data from the Hyper-V host on ports 5985 and 5986.
   • The appliance communicates with port 443 by default, to gather VMware VM data from the vCenter Server.
3. Send data: The appliance sends the collected data to Azure Migrate Server Assessment and Azure Migrate Server Migration over SSL port 443. The appliance can connect to Azure over the internet, or you can use ExpressRoute with public/Microsoft peering.
   • For performance data, the appliance collects real-time utilization data.
     • Performance data is collected every 20 seconds for VMware, and every 30 seconds for Hyper-V, for each performance metric.
     • The collected data is rolled up to create a single data point for 10 minutes.
     • The peak utilization value is selected from all of the 20/30-second data points, and sent to Azure for assessment calculation.
     • Based on the percentile value specified in the assessment properties (50th/90th/95th/99th), the ten-minute points are sorted in ascending order, and the appropriate percentile value is used to compute the assessment
   • For Server Migration, the appliance starts collecting VM data, and replicates it to Azure.
4. Assess and migrate: You can now create assessments from the metadata collected by the appliance using Azure Migrate Server Assessment. In addition, you can also start migrating VMware VMs using Azure Migrate Server Migration to orchestrate agentless VM replication.

Appliance upgrades

The appliance is upgraded as the Azure Migrate agents running on the appliance are updated.

• This happens automatically because the auto-update is enabled on the appliance by default.
• You can change this default setting to update the agents manually.
• To disable the auto-update, go to the Registry Editor>HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\AzureAppliance and set the registry key- "AutoUpdate" to 0 (DWORD).

Set agent updates to manual

For manual updates, make sure that you update all the agents on the appliance at the same time, using the Update button for each outdated agent on the appliance. You can switch the update setting back to automatic updates at any time.

Next steps

Learn how to set up the appliance for VMware. Learn how to set up the appliance for Hyper-V.