Microsoft Azure Opens Up To VMware Workloads

Microsoft has matched Amazon Web Services (AWS) by announcing plans for a couple of services designed to help businesses run VMware’s virtualisation technology on Azure.

Essentially, this means businesses with VMware workloads will be able to move their applications onto Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure.

It comes after Amazon and VMware surprised the industry in late 2016 when it was revealed that VMware Cloud services would be available on Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure.

VMware Workloads

These developments with both AWS and Azure are remarkable considering that former bitter rivals are joining forces so to speak.

“Whether you are transferring data, migrating infrastructure, modernizing applications, or building a new app, Azure allows you to move to the cloud in a way that makes the most sense for your needs,” said Corey Sanders, director of compute at Azure.

“As part of this journey, one request I hear frequently is the desire to move existing on-premises VMware workloads to Azure. This includes migrating VMware-based applications to Azure, integrating with Azure, and deploying VMware virtualization on Azure hardware.”

To this end Microsoft is offering the Azure Migrate service, free of charge from 27th November for all Azure customers.

This service will help “the journey of migrating an entire multi-server application” during discovery and assessment; the migration itself; and resource and cost optimisation.

Another service will integrate VMware workloads with Azure services.

“There are many Azure services that you can use together with VMware workloads without any migration or deployment, enabling you to keep your entire environment secure and well-managed across cloud and on-premises,” added Sanders. “This includes Azure Backup, Azure Site Recovery (for Disaster Recovery), update/configuration management, Azure Security Center and operational intelligence using Azure Log Analytics.”

VMware Stack On Azure

And finally Microsoft is offering to host VMware infrastructure with VMware virtualisation on Azure.

“Most workloads can be migrated to Azure easily using the above services; however, there may be specific VMware workloads that are initially more challenging to migrate to the cloud,” continued Sanders. “For these workloads, you may need the option to run the VMware stack on Azure as an intermediate step.”

He said that Microsoft is now offering a preview of VMware virtualisation on Azure, a bare-metal solution that runs the full VMware stack on Azure hardware, co-located with other Azure services.

General availability for these services are expected in 2018.

It should be noted that VMware has also previously struck a deal with IBM to run its virtualisation software on Big Blue’s Softlayer cloud.

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