Azure storage Mover - best for lift and shift migration

• Azure Storage Mover is Generally Available (GA).
• Fully managed migration service for files and folders to Azure Storage.
• Source could be NFS, NAS or a server
• Migration with minimal downtime
• Gives traditional “folder structure” to Azure Blob Storage.
• Migration agent is required at source location.
• You can track it’s progress.
• You need to know about permission to start the migration activity
• No need to to sync source and destination for any timespan. Once done then deregister.

Azure Storage Mover

• Storage Mover is deployed into an Azure resource group.
• Storage Mover agents are registered with a storage mover.
• You can deploy Storage Mover either on azure portal or with PowerShell. You just need 3 things-subscription, a resource group, a region, and a name.
• It can have one or more migration agents.

Azure Storage Mover agent

• At present, Windows Hyper-V is the only supported virtualization environment for your agent VM.
• You need to extract the agent VHD image to your virtualization host.
• Agent require compute, memory, network, and storage based on the number of files and folders.
• The agent requires unrestricted internet connectivity.

• Require minimum 20 GiB of local storage.
• Steps are provided here for creating agent.
• Only Generation 1 VMs are supported.
• Microsoft recommends following compute and memory resources

• Storage Mover agent can eat up your all network bandwidth.

The current Azure Storage Mover agent does not support bandwidth throttling schedules.

Otherwise create VNet with network quality of service (QoS) settings and an internet connection. Then expose the agent to the internet through this VNet.

• When you dont need it just unregister it and stop and delete agent VM
• Agent is registered with the Azure ARC service. It manages Identity of the agent.

How to register Agent?

=Azure Storage Mover + Azure Storage Mover agent VM

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage-mover/agent-register

• Registration creates trust between the agent and the cloud resource
• Registration is always initiated from the agent.
• Steps:-

1. Connect to the agent VM
2. Test network connectivity
3. Register the agent

Conclusion

This storage mover is amazing tool. It creates folder structure in Blob. No need to create blob container hierarchy manually. And once your migration task is done then deregister it. It is not continuously sync your files from source to azure.

References

Introduction to Azure Storage Mover