Microsoft has announced the limited preview of its Migration Accelerator (MA) for Azure.
The platform, brewed from the InMage acquisition in July, claims to help migrate physical, VMware, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Hyper-V workloads into Azure.
Writing on the Microsoft blog announcing the preview, Srinath Vasireddy, lead program manager for cloud at Microsoft, said that MA changes the cloud migration paradigm.
"With MA you can migrate workloads running on a broad range of platforms such as VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, Amazon Web Services and/or Physical servers within your environment. MA can support workloads running on Windows Server 2008 R2 sp1, Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2 operating systems.
"The MA portal allows you to automatically discover your enterprise workloads, remotely from the cloud. With few clicks you can configure end-to-end migration scenarios. MA allows you to test your workload in the cloud without impacting the existing on premise production workload offering the ability to validate workload functionality before a cutover is performed."
By buying up InMage, Microsoft has given itself a headstart in offering its own platform for migration, especially as there is no cost to migrating current assets to Azure. Migration also occurs in real-time. The announcement now firmly places the ball in the courts of AWS and VMware to respond with their own in-house migration tools.
