
Virtual machines
Basically called Infrastructure as a Service, a virtual machine is nothing more than transferring your existing physical server to the cloud. The existing one could be either a physical server or already a virtual one. The best scenario would be to be already on Hyper-V so that there is no real migration to the cloud and it is only a transfer. If the server is a physical one, you need to think about how to migrate it to the cloud infrastructure. The best thing would be to start with a completely new virtual machine and migrate your existing workloads to this new VM. This can be done in general using a smooth migration in coexistence, maybe, with the move to a new release of the technology (Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, file services, and so on). From my experience, this is actually the best thing to start with cloud technology as a customer if you have not yet started.