Introduction to Storage Migration Service

Storage Migration Service (SMS) allows for the migration of unstructured data such as files and shares from any Windows Server version (even including Windows Server 2003) to other physical machines, virtual machines, Azure Files, or Azure Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). The service is part of Windows Admin Center and can be used to automate the creation of a VM within Microsoft Azure when selecting an Azure VM as the destination for migration of storage. Note, however, that multiple file shares cannot be consolidated into a single-destination file share when using Storage Migration Service.

One of the benefits of SMS is that it can automatically assign the source server identity to the target server, allowing clients to automatically begin using the migrated data on the destination servers. Orchestration behind the scenes (via PowerShell) automatically configures both the server name and the server IP address(es) to lessen the administrative...