Organizations with existing SSAS Tabular models may choose to migrate to Azure Analysis Services to support their Power BI deployment and for other reasons identified in previous sections. This can be accomplished by deploying an existing on-premises model (.bim file) to an Azure Analysis Services instance from SSDT in Visual Studio.

In the following screenshot, the deployment server of an existing SSAS model is changed to an Azure Analysis Services server:

This page can be accessed by right-clicking the Analysis Services project name in SSDT and selecting Configuration Properties. Via the Do Not Process from the Processing Option property, only the metadata of the model will be deployed to the Azure Analysis Services server. Additionally, note that the server name to ensure should be the management server name provided by Azure Analysis Services in the Azure portal as described in the following section. 

With a successful deployment of the model's metadata from SSDT, the user can manage and process the Azure Analysis Services model in SSMS. In the following screenshot, the same AdWorksImport model is now deployed to both an on-premises server (ATLAS) and the Azure Analysis Services server:

As shown in the preceding screenshot, the AdWorksImport database is now deployed to both an on-premises instance of SQL Server Analysis Services (Tabular) and an Azure Analysis Services instance. The same functionality SSAS developers and managers are familiar with in SSMS, such as viewing and processing partitions and tables of models, is still fully supported with Azure Analysis Services.