In order to embrace continual change, organisations need greater resilience and agility. That means accelerating digital business initiatives to power future growth. However digital transformation is often held back by business and technical realities, talent shortage or financial constraints. With Azure VMware Solution, Microsoft is helping customers overcome these challenges and their modernize enterprise VMware workloads quickly and cost effectively in Microsoft Azure. Let’s take a look at how Azure VMware solution makes it easier for customers to run enterprise workloads in the cloud.

It's a cloud collaboration
Alongside the implementation of cloud services, Microsoft has accelerated its business partnerships with Open-Source and other product vendors. One of its principal motivations is to provide uninterrupted service to its customers. From a shared customer first mentality, a strong partnership between Microsoft and VMware, the pioneer of virtualization software, emerged, to deliver an optimal cloud environment and solution portfolio.

The cloud imperative
Today migrating to the cloud is seen as a business imperative, which is why so many organizations are flocking there. There are many different factors driving cloud journeys from data center contract expiry; the need for software and hardware refresh or software end of support; to urgent capacity requirements; compliance; costs, security; business continuity, and the list goes on.

One thing is for sure, digital transformation accelerates revenue growth. Companies that scaled tech adoption and innovation during the pandemic saw 5x fast revenue growth and ‘leapfrogger’ companies that sped up digital transformation saw 4x faster revenue growth.

Introducing the Azure VMWare solution
Azure VMware Solution enables organizations to fast forward digital transformation and innovation. It provides a fast path to the cloud by enabling the seamless migration or extension of existing VMware workloads from on-premises environments to Azure, without the cost, effort or risk of re-architecting applications or retooling operations.

Azure VMware Solution is a Microsoft service, verified by VMware, that runs on Azure infrastructure, allowing you to manage and secure your existing VMware workloads with the same VMware tools that you already know, such as VMware vSphere, vSan and vCenter, while you modernize your applications with Azure native management, security and services.

Put the continuity, scale and fast provisioning of global Azure infrastructure to work on your VMware workloads for the following scenarios:

Introducing Azure VMWare solution features

Familiarity with VMware technology:
Maintain operational consistency for your administrators as you continue to use VMware for resources and tools running on Azure infrastructure.

• Native vSphere support
• Fully featured networking stack
• vSphere management, vSAN, and NSX-T
• HCX Enterprise available to support migration

Integration with Azure:
Easily scale your infrastructure to meet demand through the Azure Portal.

• Management and governance
• Security
• Low-latency connectivity to Azure
• Leverage the Azure ecosystem
• Single point of support
• DevOps toolchain

High-performance cloud infrastructure:
Capitalise on the high-performance of Azure infrastructure for your VMware workloads.

• Optimized elastic infrastructure
• Automated self-service provisioning
• Dedicated, isolated, bare metal infrastructure
• Redundancy and placement control
• Security and encryption
• DevOps toolchain

Your questions answered
I want to conclude this article by addressing five questions that we often get asked about the Azure VMware solution.

1. What VMware products are included with Azure VMware Solution?
   Customers can maintain operational consistency as they accelerate a move to the cloud with the use of familiar VMware technology and tools including some of the latest versions of vSphere, NSX, and vSAN. With additional features from HCX Enterprise, customers can further simplify their migration efforts to Azure including support for bulk live migrations.




2. Can VMware workloads running in Azure integrate with other native Azure services?
   Yes. Azure VMware Solution is a native Azure service and has native integration with Azure’s broad ecosystem of services including DR, Backup, Azure Active Directory, Azure management and security services, Azure Cognitive Services, network, storage, and more.




3. Where is Azure VMware Solution generally available today?
   The service is currently available in 23 Azure regions with more added regularly. View the products available by region.




4. What is the Software and Hardware package for the solution?

   
   

   Software Specifications	Hardware Specifications
   vCenter – 7.0 U3c	Model – AV36 (36 Cores)
   ESXi - 7.0 U3c	CPU - dual Intel 18 core 2.3 GHz (SkyLake)
   vSAN - 7.0 U3c	Memory – 576 GB
   HCX – 4.3.3	Storage vSAN Caching - 2 × 1.6 TB NVMe
   NSX-T – 3.1.2	Storage vSAN Capacity - 8 × 1.92 TB SSD
   	Network - 2 - Dual Port 25 GbE




5. What are the pricing benefits of Azure VMware Solution?
   The service can be consumed on an hourly basis. Costs can be lowered with monthly consumption pricing by reusing your existing on-premises licenses for Windows Server and SQL Server. In addition, one or three years of Azure Reserved Instance and Azure Hybrid Benefit can be used to obtain high-price benefits.

If you would like to learn more about how we can use our extensive experience helping our customers to adopt Microsoft Azure and hybrid cloud implementations, to develop a roadmap for your cloud journey that maximises the value of your cloud investments, check out our Journey to the Cloud Guide or get in touch today.