Infrastcuture in the cloud (IaaS) is such an evolving topic from the architectual point of view. As services do evolve and more functionalities get added in order to enable the end user to untilise these services in best forms, complexities do start to add to it.

IaaS require a lot of initial planning to minimise any downtime required to re-allocate services/servers for production (Prod).

If breaking to Azure services started as a proof of concept (PoC) initially and changed suddenly to being the business critical service that your business can’t function without – without the necessary transitional planning then we are on the same page here.

Microsoft Azure does add a lot of value to the business and continuity of its business operations.

In this article I will go over Azure different resources and the way they could be organised for ease of management and billing. Billing is an important topic if you want to understand how your services are being utilised in the cloud or in order to bill each business unit if your business is using the charge back model.

If you have just started building your infrastructure on Azure, ensure your business units use Azure Resource Groups to group their services/servers and that could save you a lot of time in the long run.

The way to move resources between different resource groups are a complex ‘PowerShell driven process’. First you need to understand the limitiation of resource move:

1. vNet’s can’t be moved
2. Re-allocated Azure resources will retain their source region, even if your destination resource group is in a different region.
3. You can’t move a single VM attached to a cloud service, the cloud service and all VM’s attached to it will have to move together.
4. From experience, move storage accounts seperately. When I try to move a storage account with the rest of resources I get error (“One resource move request can contain resources of only 1 provider.”) :
5. If you would like to migrate the VM to a new vNet then the VM needs to be deleted and reprovisioned on the vNet – the VM will down for that duration.
6. If you would like to move the VM to a new storage account, then the downtime will be much greater depending how big the VHD files are and the region. I won’t talk much about this process, you will find it detailed here.

Now we will talk about the interesting part, the move and re-allocation process.

1. Download the latest Azure Powershell module (We will be using the latest Azure Resource Management module) as illustrated here
2. Login to your subscription using Login-AzureRmAccount
3. Get the content of your source resource group on Azure: Get-AzureRmResource
4. Feed the output to Move-AzureRmResource

I have written a short script to demonstrate this process (MS Azure Resource Group Management(MS Azure Resource Group Management), I have added comments necessary to each of the steps in the script so you should be able to customize it to your needs.