Understand Azure Cobalt 100 VMs and MySQL migration strategy

Azure Cobalt 100 Arm-based processor

Azure Cobalt 100 is Microsoft’s first-generation Arm-based processor, built on Arm Neoverse N2. It allocates a dedicated physical core for each vCPU, which provides consistent and predictable performance for cloud-native, scale-out Linux workloads. These characteristics make Cobalt 100 well suited for open-source databases such as MySQL, where consistent I/O throughput and low-latency query execution are critical for production workloads.

To learn more, see the Microsoft blog Announcing the preview of new Azure VMs based on the Azure Cobalt 100 processor .

MySQL migrations

MySQL is a cross-platform relational database system whose storage engines and on-disk formats are designed for reliability and portability. When you move between CPU architectures, such as x64 to Arm, MySQL documentation recommends a logical migration instead of copying raw data files.

A practical approach is to use mysqldump to export SQL, transfer the dump, and import it on the Arm target with the mysql client. The MySQL 8.4 Reference Manual recommends this approach for cross-architecture transfers.

What you’ve learned and what’s next

You’ve now learned about Azure Cobalt 100 and the recommended MySQL migration method for x64-to-Arm moves.

Next, you’ll create a simulated on-premises x64 server in Azure and prepare it as the migration source environment.