Microsoft recently held the 2020 Ignite conference. Just like in previous years, there were many announcements introducing new services and expanded capabilities of existing ones, especially in Azure.

Ahead of Ignite, I was asked to take a test drive of one of the new features, Azure Resource Mover (in preview). It’s easy to move a resource group to another subscription or move a resource to another resource group, but it hasn’t been easy to move a resource to another Azure region. This problem is now solved with Azure Resource Mover which allows you to move a resource such as a VM or Azure SQL Database to another region, and it figures out the dependencies for you.

Why would anyone want to move a resource to another region? Well, it might make sense to move resources closer to end users to decrease latency, maybe the organization has been part of an acquisition or merger and now they need to consolidate resources, or maybe a new region you have been waiting for has opened. There could be many reasons to move a resource to another region, and this new service makes it easy to do. You may be wondering about cost, however, and using this service is free.

I recently wrote a blog post about my experience if you would like to see more details of the process, but I’ll provide an overview here. Instead of using the Azure Portal for the move, you can also use PowerShell or Azure CLI.

1. Launch the Azure Resource Mover page
2. Set the subscription, source, destination
3. Choose the resource to move
4. Check for and add the dependencies
5. Modify destination resource settings as required, for example, resizing the VM
6. Prepare, initiate, and move the resources
7. Clean up old resources, or keep them in place if you wish

Note that it will take some time, maybe even days, to move a large VM. I’ve never tried to move a VM using the old process, but Microsoft says this new service significantly reduces the time required.

I also moved an Azure SQL Database. There was one big difference: I had to make sure that the target SQL Server service was in place. I already had one in the target region, so I just moved the database into that.

Azure Resource Mover is just one of the many announcements from the 2020 Microsoft Ignite conference!