Azure Storage Mover

 Azure Storage Mover

Azure Storage Mover is a new, fully managed migration service that enables you to migrate your files and folders to Azure Storage while minimizing downtime for your workload. Storage Mover can use for different migration scenarios such as lift-and-shift, and for cloud migrations that you have to repeat occasionally.

A single storage mover resource deployed to your subscription can be used to manage migrations for your source shares located in different parts of the world.

Azure Storage Mover is a hybrid cloud service. Hybrid services have both a cloud service component and an infrastructure component. The service administrator runs the infrastructure component in their corporate environment. 

 

The current Azure Storage Mover release supports only certain, specific source-target pair migration path scenarios.

The following table identifies the currently supported source-to-destination scenarios:

When migrating data from a source endpoint using the SMB protocol, Storage Mover supports the same level of file fidelity as the underlying Azure file share. Folder structure and metadata values such as file and folder timestamps, ACLs, and file attributes are maintained.

When migrating data from an NFS source, the Storage Mover service represents empty folders as an empty blob in the target. The metadata of the source folder is persisted in the custom metadata field of this blob, just as they are with files.

 

Deployment Basics

 

A deployment of Azure Storage Mover consists out of cloud service components and one or more migration agents you run in your environment, close to the source storage. A storage mover resource comprises the cloud service component. This resource is deployed within your choice of Azure subscription and resource group.

When you deploy an Azure storage mover resource, you also need to choose a region. The region you select only determines where control messages are sent and metadata about your migration is stored. 

The data that is migrated, is sent directly from the agent to the target in Azure Storage. Your files never travel through the Storage Mover service 

 

 

Getting your Azure Subscription Ready

 Your subscription must be in the same Azure Active Directory tenant as the target Azure
storage accounts you want to migrate into.

 

Resource provider namespaces The subscription must be registered with the resource provider namespaces. Microsoft.StorageMover and Microsoft.HybridCompute

Permissions

Azure Storage Mover requires special care for the permissions an admin needs for various management scenarios. The service exclusively uses Role Based Access Control (RBAC) for management actions (control plane) and for target storage access (data plane).

Understanding the Azure Storage Mover resource hierarchy

Several Azure resources are involved in a Storage Mover deployment

 

 

Storage mover resource 

storage mover resource is the name of the top-level service resource that you deploy in a resource group of your choice. All aspects of the service and of your migration are controlled from this resource. In most cases, deploying a single storage mover resource is sufficient for even the largest migrations.

Migration Agent

Storage Mover is a hybrid service and utilizes one or more migration agents to facilitate migrations.

The Azure Storage Mover service utilizes agents to perform the migration jobs you configure in the service.

An agent is a virtual machine-based migration appliance that runs on a virtualization host. Ideally, your virtualization host is located as near as possible to the source storage to be migrated. Storage Mover can support multiple agents.

You can deploy several migration agent VMs and register each with a unique name to the same storage mover resource. The Storage Mover resource itself isn't directly responsible for migrating your data. Instead, a migration agent copies your data from the source and sends it directly to the target in Azure Storage

Deploy an Azure Storage Mover agent

Agent is essentially a migration appliance, you interact with it through an agent-local administrative shell. The shell limits the operations you can perform on this machine, though network configuration and troubleshooting tasks are accessible.

Use of the agent in migrations is managed through Azure. Both Azure PowerShell and CLI are supported, and graphical interaction is available within the Azure portal. The agent is made available as a disk image compatible with new Windows Hyper-V virtual machines (VM).

Migration project

A project allows you to organize your larger scale cloud migrations into smaller. The smallest unit of a migration can be defined as the contents of one source moving into one target. but data center migrations are rarely that simple. Often multiple sources support one workload and must be migrated together for timely failover of the workload to the new cloud storage locations in Azure.

In a different example, one source may even need to be split into multiple target locations. The reverse is also possible, where you need to combine multiple sources into sub-paths of the same target location in Azure.

Job Definition

A Job definition is contained within a project. The job definition describes a source, a target, and the migration settings you want to use the next time you start a copy from the defined source to the defined target in Azure.

Source, target, and their optional subpath information are locked when a job definition is created. If you want to reuse the same target but use a different source (or vice versa), you're required to create a new job definition.

The job definition also keeps a historic record of past copy runs and their results

Job run
When you start a job definition, a new resource is implicitly created: a job run resource. The job definition contains all the information the storage mover service needs to start a copy. In a typical migration, you might copy from source to target several times. Each time you start a job definition, it's recorded in a job run.

The job run is a snapshot of the job definition and given to the migration agent you've selected. The agent then has all the necessary information about source, target, and the migration behavior it needs to follow to accomplish the migration you've previously defined.

Endpoint

Migrations require well defined source and target locations. While the term endpoint is often used in networking

An endpoint contains the path to the storage location and additional information. While there's a single endpoint resource, the properties of each endpoint may vary, based on the type of endpoint.

For example, NFS shares, SMB shares, and Azure Storage blob container endpoints each require fundamentally different information. Endpoints are used in the creation of a job definition. Only certain types of endpoints may be used as a source or a target, respectively

Storage Mover Deployment Step by Step

                1. Create an Azure Storage Mover resource
                2. Deploy an Azure Storage Mover agent
                            Download the agent VM image
                            Create Agent VM
                3. Register an Azure Storage Mover agent
                4. Create an endpoint
                            Create a source endpoint
                            Create a target endpoint
                5. Create a project
                6. Create and start a job definition

 

 

 

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Further information follow the below link :-

"How to Deploy Storage Mover" https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage-mover/storage-mover-create?tabs=portal

"Understanding Azure Storage Mover billing"
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage-mover/billing?tabs=consumption

"Azure Storage Mover scale and performance targets"

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage-mover/performance-targets?tabs=smb