Move Azure Resources between Subscriptions

In this post, you will learn how to move Azure resources between subscriptions on Azure. Microsoft Azure is a very flexible public cloud platform that allows you to take complete ownership of almost everything. With Azure, you can move resources from one resource group to another. It is also possible to move resources like Azure Virtual Machine, and Storage accounts from one subscription to another. Azure also offers the flexibility of moving one subscription from one Tenant to another. Controlling your cloud spending is crucial, learn how to Control Cloud Cost Using Azure VM. When deploying resources on Azure, the performance of those resources is essential, learn about performance and diagnostics in Microsoft Cloud with Azure Monitor. Learn also about how to perform Bulk User Operations in Azure AD.

It is necessary sometimes to move resources from one subscription to another if your organization’s policy demands that it should be done. The reason why your organization may decide to do this might be because the subscription currently hosting their resources is about to be exhausted. So if they have a subscription sitting within the same Azure tenant, they can start moving resources to it. For example, if you move an Azure SQL logical server and its databases, and dependent resources to a different resource group or subscription. All the apps using the database will experience downtime. They can still access the databases and read and write to them. It is also very easy to Migrate Azure Web Apps to Azure.

There are resources that can be moved while some cannot be moved. You need to verify which resources can and cannot be moved is a good idea before you start. Check the Microsoft Docs page to know which resources can be moved.

Move Resources between Subscription

To move a resource or group of resources from one Azure subscription to another, you need to have an active Azure Subscription with the appropriate permission. If you don’t already have a subscription, you can sign up for the Azure free account to get started.

Let’s move the app currently hosted on my MSDN subscription to my Microsoft Azure Sponsorship subscription. Both subscriptions are in the same Azure Active Directory which can also be called Tenant.

Here are some related guides: How to move a computer object from one container (OU) to another, How to setup Azure AD Tenant, how to fix Connectivity to a writable domain controller from node could not be determined because of an error: The distinguished name of the node could not be determined, and how to move OneDrive Folder to a Different Location in Windows 10.

To move resources, follow the below steps:

Step 1: Locate the Resource Group where the resources you want to move are stored. This resource group is known as the source resource group.

Step 2. Select all the resources within the source Resource Group and click on the drop-down icon below Move to the right-hand of your screen and then select ‘Move to another subscription‘. Notice that there is also an option to move the resources to another Resource Group.

Step 3. Select the source + target resource group and subscription and click on ‘Next’.

Step 4. Allow the system to validate the resources that you want to move. Validation of each resources will take place automatically.

When the validation is complete, the validation status for each resource will report as succeeded. Click Next to continue.

Step 5. Review, accept the condition, and then click on Move to move the resources. The review screen will show the summary of both the source and target subscriptions, Resource Groups, and the number of resources you want to move.

After clicking on the Move button to begin the process of moving your resources, check the progress status by clicking on the notification icon on top of the portal.

It will take some time for the resource movement to be complete. When it completes, you will receive a notification for it.

Confirming Resources in the Target Subscription

Now that we have successfully moved all the resources to another subscription, let’s confirm that they are there. Please see also how to change the default Save and Download Location in Windows.

To do so, browse your target subscription and locate the target resource group to see all your resources. You can locate other subscriptions within Tenant on the Billing + Subscription Blade.

Congratulations! You have successfully moved your resources from one subscription to another. The steps above also cover moving resources from one Resource Group to another Resource Group in another subscription.

Clean up resources

It is always advisable to clean up resources after each task you perform on Azure to avoid being charged. Here, we want to clean up the resources in our target resource group.

To save time we will use Azure CLI to delete the resource group containing all the resources.

To do so, first, call the az login command to log into Azure via the command line.

Secondly, we need to set the target subscription where resources are hosted. Run the below commands to set the target subscription and delete the resource group containing your resources:

$az account set --subscription <sub ID> --set target subscription 
$az group delete --name <Name>  -- delete a resource group

I hope you found this blog post helpful. Please let me know in the comment section if you have any questions.