The way to migrate to Hyper-V / Azure : Introduction

Today, i’m going to talk about the ways to migrate to a  Microsoft virtualization technology from a no-Microsoft Virtualization technology.

The two Microsoft technologies i’m talking about are:

• Hyper-V
• Microsoft Azure

And the no-Microsoft technologies are:

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

Let’s begin with a short history. VMware was always and still the leader of the virtulization market share. But with the release of Hyper-V in 2008 (With Windows Server 2008), rules changed. I’m not saying that Hyper-V 2008 was perfect or was competitive regards VMware, but i’m saying that this was the beginning of a new two horses course.

The real competition began with the announcement of Windows Server 2012 (Hyper-V 3.0) and the competitive advantages of Hyper-V 2012 compared to VMware, in scalability, performance or on a feature perspective. ( 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.

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

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)

Gartner 2014 Iaas MQ

 Gartner 2014 PaaS MQ

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. In this blog series, i will talk about those tools and try to explain the options of using them.

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)