Over the last few months since the Azure team have announced that the new portal is out of preview, and that the new portal and ARM should really be the focus for future Azure projects, it has led to many questions about migration paths, and why some services are still only in the old portal, such as Azure Active Directory and the backup and site recovery services. Venkat Gattamneni has just posted on the Azure virtual machine blog which covers the approach you should be taking for Azure virtual machine migrations from ASM to ARM, including the efforts that are underway to help simplify the process.
Here’s some of the information that is shared in this post, I strongly recommend you head on over and take a look at what else he covers, as well as keep an eye on the comments section to see what else is raised and addressed.
| Solution | Customer Experience | Expected availability in 2016 |
| Script migration | VM is rebooted as it is recreated in the Resource Manager model. While the Virtual Machines for the environment are recreated, the network is disconnected. |
Q1 |
| Virtual Machines, no VNET | As all Virtual Machines deployed in the Resource Manager model must be in a VNet, Virtual Machines will be migrated and placed in a new VNET. This will result in a change in network configuration, requiring a reboot to reconnect. |
Q2 |
| Virtual Machines with VNET | Starting in Q2, the platform will offer Virtual Machine migration from ASM to Resource Manager model without disrupting the running Virtual Machine. This will require disconnecting any VNets connected on-premises, whether via ExpressRoute or VPN, before doing the migration. |
Q2 |
| Virtual Machines with basic hybrid (one connection) | Starting in Q3, the platform will offer Virtual Machine migration from ASM to Resource Manager model without disrupting the running Virtual Machine and with minimal disruption to a basic hybrid connection, limited to just one connection back on-premises. More complex connections will require disconnecting before doing the migration. |
Q3 |