Moving your traditional website from a Windows IIS server to Azure App Service has never been easier. Microsoft provides a great tool to migrate to Azure App Service, it’s called App Service Migration Assessment Tool. To be able to use this tool, you must have access to the server where your IIS site is located.
I have set up a Windows server 2016 with a very simple IIS site. When accessing the site URL vmsite.pedholtlab.com we will see the site content.
1. First, we will check that our site is cable of running in an Azure App Service. Access the App Service Migration Assessment Tool.
Provide the website name in the URL field, and select “Assess”
Next, we will see the result of the assessment, if there are any errors it will tell us what to do before we can move it to Azure App Service. But in our case, everything is looking good. so lets select “Start Migrating Now!”
2. Our next step is to install the migration tool, so Jump over to the IIS server where our website lives, and download the Migration assistant from LINK.
Run the AppServiceMigrationAssistant.msi installer, it will be a very quick installation, after you press “Run” it will create a desktop icon for AppServiceMigrationAssistant.
3. Now that we have the tool installed, we are up for the final task, and migrate it to Azure. Open AppServiceMigrationAssistant on the desktop and select the site you would like to migrate.
Now it will go through all your website’s content and settings. i’am getting a warning for Application settings, because Azure App Service has its own types of Application settings in the portal, so it’s just telling me to be aware of that. You will be able to find descriptions of what the warnings mean here. I will ignore that warning because I don’t need the application settings for this site, I will continue.
We will need to log in from the migration assistant application.
Provide username and password for an Azure account that has rights to create new resources.
Return to Migration assistant application, and fill out Subscription, resource group, and a destination site(Azure Web App). It will create a new Azure Web App for you, you can’t migrate it to an existing Web App.
Hit the “Migrate” Bottom!
When it has completed the Migration progress without errors then you are good to go!
As you can see I have the same content but now running on Azure App Service.
We can go an check the resources that it has created for us in the portal.
When it’s creating a new app service for you in the migration assistant, it will also create an App Service Plan with a random number, in the end, the app service size will match your current server specs so be aware of that when you let the migration assistant create it for you.
