Bulk VM Migration

Microsoft Azure is an application platform developed and incorporated under Microsoft technologies to provide support for distributed application environment over public or hybrid clouds.

The Managed Portal under Azure is categorized with services and groups as defined in the below figure. Visit Us!
These services are grouped, specific to their functional procedures and solutions to be utilized for application migration and development. Ref. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/fundamentals-introduction-to-azure?toc=%2fazure%2fdeveloper-guide%2ftoc.json )

Import/Export, under Data Management covers the bulk data transfer and integration services to support On-Premise data transfer to VM datacenters and vice versa.

Application environments use different types of tools to upload and download information and data results over the web or cloud based servers. The data being transferred require large bandwidth and potentially high latencies to move freely within the network. The Import/Export functionality under Managed Data application will provide a secure base to move bulk amount of data to BitLocker encrypted drives and send these drives to an Azure datacenter.

So, any drive can be imported to a specific Azure Storage account or can be exported to drives and sent to your locations as well.

A drive preparation tool is used by the system to prepare the drives and encrypt the files with BitLocker (Ref: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/storage-import-export-service#create-an-import-job-in-the-management-portal )

Following are the parameters:

• Drive size can be 4 TB with specifications for 3.5 SATA II/III drive.
• Each transaction including importing and exporting of data can include 10 hard drives.
• 20 active jobs per storage account can be provided to each entity involved in migration.
• Import/Export service will only support block and page BLOBs (IaaS VM VHDs can be stored in page BLOBs.)

User can optimize time and the amount of data transferred with the use of these Import/Export services. The drive movement can take few days, based on the location, availability and the need of data. These services can be enhanced with delta sync to synchronize changes (deltas) with data movement. The delta synch will then be processed via Azure data centers for VM transfer and storage. Ref the below image:

With this service of Import/Export, the need is to thoroughly understand the types of storage of your virtual environment. These drives can be resized and maintained, for the specified amount of bulk data and the required storage. Contact for Microsoft CSP Portal

The file transfer protocol used under these services includes SMB protocol to store and configure your data on the Azure VM centers. The specific version of the SMB will help you analyze the requirement for Azure File configurations. For more information, ref. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-subscription-service-limits