Today Microsoft has announced the Migration Accelerator (MA) for Azure. MA is in limited preview now and is designed with the technology from their acquisition of InMage.
MA will automate the different aspects of migrating physical, VMware, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Hyper-V workloads into Azure. By automating discovery of source workloads, remote agent installation, network adaption, and endpoint configuration MA is designed to reduce cost and risk of migrating to Azure.
MA offers migrating workloads from a wide range of platforms, automated migration, the ability to migrate multi-tier projects with consistency, a continuous replication, and the least cutover time. MA does this by using a mobility service in the form of a guest based centrally deployed agent that is installed on source servers, a process server, master target that is installed within a dedicated Azure VM, configuration server, and a MP portal.
If all that doesn’t make sense, you probably either want to ignore it, or go here to find out more. And ignoring the technical terms, this is a migration tool that makes it easier to switch from the competition to Azure. In big projects if it wasn’t easy to move to Azure – even if it was superior – it would be highly unlikely that a company would. This is Microsoft continuing to invest in Azure and make it more accessible.
