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Hyper-V / Azure VM Series: Introduction to 3rd party VM Migration (1/4)

This article discusses ways to migrate to a Microsoft virtualization technology from a non-Microsoft Virtualization technology.

The two Microsoft technologies discussed are:

  • Hyper-V
  • Microsoft Azure

The non-Microsoft technologies are:

  • VMware
  • Physical servers
  • Public Cloud Platforms (AWS…)

Let’s begin with a short history. VMware has long been an easy leader of the virtualization market share. The release of Hyper-V in 2008 (With Windows Server 2008) changed this. The decision on which to choose is no longer decided before it's taken. Hyper-V 2008 is a real alternative and began to eat into VMWare market share.

The real competition began with the announcement of Windows Server 2012 (Hyper-V 3.0) which offers significant advantages over VMware, in scalability, performance and on features. (See here)

Hyper-V become a first class enterprise visualization technology that enterprises can trust, deploy and use to run production and sensitive enterprise workloads. The following picture shows the hypervisor share growth, and how Hyper-V is gaining in share of shipment while VMware declines.

https://buildwindows.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/hypervisor-share-growth.png?w=401&h=229

Also Gartner recognizes Microsoft as a leader along with VMware in the x86 Virtualization Magic Quadrant (See here)

https://buildwindows.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/gartner-2014-virtualization-mq.png?w=344&h=344

Also, regarding the Public Cloud platforms, today Microsoft is a leader in the IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service) and Storage services. The following are the Gartner 2014 MQ results (See here)

https://buildwindows.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/gartner-2014-public-cloud-iaass-mq.png?w=300&h=300

Gartner 2014 Iaas MQ

https://buildwindows.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/gartner-2014-public-cloud-paass-mq.png?w=300&h=300

 Gartner 2014 PaaS MQ

https://buildwindows.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/gartner-2014-public-cloud-storage-mq.png?w=300&h=300

Gartner 2014 Storage Services MQ

As a result, and to provide users a way to pass from all these technologies to Hyper-V, Microsoft started delivering tools and solutions to perform such migrations. This article series will cover these tools and explain the options.

The series is divided into 4 parts:

  1. The way to migrate to Hyper-V / Azure : Introduction
  2. The way to migrate  VMware to Hyper-V: SCVMM V2V
  3. The way to migrate VMware/Physical to  Hyper-V / Azure: MVMC/MAT
  4. The way to migrate from anywhere to Azure: Migration Accelerator (MA)