Using the Microsoft Migration Accelerator to migrate production workloads to Azure for testing…

Hopefully you know by now that we released the preview version of the Microsoft Migration Accelerator (and if not, feel free to check it out at here).  With MMA, it is possible to migrate VMware VM’s, Hyper-V VM’s, AWS VM’s, and even physical Windows servers to Azure.   So with MMA we have the ability to migrate workloads from most any environment to Azure and the plan is that we will soon have the ability to move workloads back as well which will allow the delivery of a true Disaster Recovery solution encompassing a wide spectrum of environments.  However, I believe there is also a nice side benefit to the MMA and the upcoming DR solution and that is the ability to bring up an OS and Application consistent replica of a distributed application to an isolated lab network for the purposes of testing and troubleshooting without disrupting the production deployment form which it came from.  Even better when that isolated lab network exists on something like Azure which allows for on-demand compute, network, and storage services.  I created a short demonstration video to show the MMA in action in this type of scenario.  If you have a free 17 minutes and 33 seconds (or at least 8 minutes and 46.5 seconds if you are like me and watch these type of things in ‘Fast’ mode), feel free to check it out here.