Well, if we're talking about agent list, Tim,
what's this Azure Migrate appliance?
Well, the idea is because Azure Migrate: Server Migration doesn't have a
requirement for a site‑to‑site VPN, you need to have some engine of creation
on‑prem. So the Azure Migrate appliance is a downloadable Windows Server
2016 VM that runs on an evaluation license, and it includes a web
application that allows you to register that appliance into your Azure
Migrate server migration project and then take care of orchestrating the
assessment and migration.
There are some limits in the Microsoft docs, 10,000 VMware hosts, 5,000 Hyper‑V
hosts, 1,000 physical servers per appliance, but of course, you can have
multiple appliances. When you turn the appliance loose,
it's going to scan and inventory your environment, and then in your
project you create an assessment. You want that assessment to take
into account as much data as possible.
So what I mean by longer assessment times really means you want to tune
your assessment and give Azure hints, for example,
are you looking to do reserved instances?
Are you looking to do hybrid use benefit? These sorts of things that Azure
would not be able to make an evaluation on. The assessment process that it
automates is looking at the compute, and storage, and networking and giving you
advice on what the target virtual machine configuration should be, you see?
Dependency analysis is an option. It's not required with Azure Migrate: Server
Migration, but it's cool because it allows you to model the client and server
connections going on on those VMs or on those physical servers that you're
looking to migrate to make sure that you're not surprised post migration,
uh‑oh, I forgot about this dependency on this API or whatever it might be,
you see? And then as far as monitoring in the long term,
once the machine is migrated, it becomes an Azure VM, so it's
natively a part of Azure Resource Manager.
So you've got Azure Monitor, Log Analytics,
Sentinel, all of these different monitoring platforms,
Application Insights. But notice that first one in this last bullet point,
Arc. I would submit that you have your on‑premises servers, at least some of
them, maybe your Hyper‑V hosts registered in Azure Arc so you can do
Azure‑based management, if nothing else,
as a prep step for preparing those machines for integration into the Azure ecosystem.