We have seen the process of creating a new server from scratch. What would we do with the existing physical servers or virtual servers running on an on-premises hypervisor such as ESX or Hyper-V so that we can move to the cloud? Well, the answer is relatively straightforward.

Let's assume that for the purposes of this exercise, you want to convert an existing server as it is, but with configuration changes.

In order to migrate an existing server to a Microsoft Azure virtual machine, we need to have our server's disks as VHDs. Unsurprisingly, VHDs are the disk formats that Hyper-V uses too. So, if you have a physical server, you can use your Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) that is part of System Center to perform a physical-to-virtual (P2V) migration of the server and its disks. This would need to be done on premises. There are other third-party P2V tools that could also be used to perform the migration. Alternatively, if you are using a different...