Microsoft Corp.’s latest cloud tool should make it considerably easier for companies to transfer their on-premises applications to its infrastructure-as-a-service platform.

Azure Migrate, which was unveiled today, is touted as a convenient means of moving workloads powered by VMware Inc.’s hypervisor off in-house gear. The latter provider’s software is the most popular option on the market for virtualizing servers to improve hardware utilization. Whereas other migration tools often require performing transfers one machine at a time, Microsoft said its new service allows administrators to take a much more efficient approach.

Azure Migrate can map out a company’s VMware-virtualized applications without causing any operational changes. Then, the service visualizes the individual components to show how they interact with another. Administrators can use this information to group the piece-parts based on operational dependencies and move them to Azure in the order that is easiest to carry out.

For added measure, Azure Migrate generates an estimate of how much hardware each workload will require. Companies are thus spared the trouble of manually figuring out what infrastructure they need to provision on Microsoft’s cloud.

The task of physically transferring a workload, in turn, can be performed using existing Azure services. Microsoft also provides tools that let companies substitute the value-added features VMware offers for automating backups and other operational work. 

However, certain workloads can nonetheless be difficult to adapt for a new environment. With that in mind, Microsoft is rolling out Azure Migrate alongside the ability to run VMware-virtualized applications as-is on its infrastructure.

In theory, this feature could let the technology giant compete for applications that companies might normally not consider moving to the cloud because of logistical constraints. Microsoft’s decision to support VMware is made especially notable by the fact that it offers a competing hypervisor called called Hyper-V.

Azure Migrate is free and will become generally available on Nov. 27.

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