A few techniques are available to migrate a virtual machine from on-premises to the cloud. In this section, we will discuss the techniques for a migration using Azure as a destination:
Offline conversion with considerable downtime: A conversion is required when the virtual machine running on-premises is using a format that is not supported by the native cloud platform. For example, VMware virtual machines use
.vmdkvirtual disk files. We cannot place those on Microsoft Azure without first converting the virtual disks to.vhdformat.Move with no downtime involved: A move is basically transfer of the virtual machine without adjustments to the cloud platform. This can currently be done offline for virtual machines using VHD virtual disks running on Hyper-V. At the moment, it is not possible to perform an online migration using Hyper-V Live Migration. It is probably only a matter of time until we can do Live Migrations to the cloud and back.
Replication with limited downtime...