Hell freezes over - VMware virtualization on Microsoft Azure
Update
On November 22, 2017, Ajay Patel (Senior Vice President, Product Development, Cloud Services, VMware) published a blog post in reaction to Microsofts announcement (VMware – The Platform of Choice in the Cloud). Especially these statements are interesting:
No VMware-certified partner names have been mentioned nor have any partners collaborated with VMware in engineering this offering. This offering has been developed independent of VMware, and is neither certified nor supported by VMware.
and
Microsoft recognizing the leadership position of VMware’s offering and exploring support for VMware on Azure as a superior and necessary solution for customers over Hyper-V or native Azure Stack environments is understandable but, we do not believe this approach will offer customers a good solution to their hybrid or multi-cloud future.
Looks like VMware is not happy about Microsofts annoucement. And this blog post clearly states, that VMware will not partner with VMware to bringt VMware virtualization stack on Azure.
I don’t know if this is a wise decision of VMware. The hypervisor, their core product, is a commodity nowadays. We are taking about a bare-metal solution, so it’s not different from what VMware build with AWS. It’s more about how it is embedded in the cloud services and cloud control plane. If you use VMware vSphere, Horizon and O365, the step to move virtualization workloads to VMware on Azure is smaller, than move it to AWS.
On November 23, 2017, the register published this interesting analysis: VMware refuses to support its wares running in Azure.
Original post
Yesterday, Microsoft announced new services to ease the migration from VMware to Microsoft Azure. Corey Sanders (Director of Compute, Azure) posted a blog post (Transforming your VMware environment with Microsoft Azure) and introduced three new Azure services.
Azure Migrate
The free Azure Migrate service does not focus on single server workloads. It is focused on multi-server application and will help customers through the three staged
- Discovery and assessment
- Migration, and
- Resource & Cost Optimization
Azure Migrate can discover your VMware-hosted applications on-premises, it can visualize dependencies between them, and it will help customers to create a suitable sizing for the Azure hosted VMs. Azure Site Recovery (ASR) is used for the migration of workloads from the on-premises VMware infrastructure to Microsoft Azure. At the end, when your applications are running on Microsoft Azure, the free Azure Cost Management service helps you to forecast, track, and optimize your spendings.
Integrate VMware workloads with Azure services
Many of the current available Azure services can be used with your on-premises VMware infrastructure, without the need to migrate workloads to Microsoft Azure. This includes Azure Backup, Azure Site Recovery, Azure Log Analytics or managing Microsoft Azure resources with VMware vRealize Automation.
But the real game-changer seesm to bis this:
Host VMware infrastructure with VMware virtualization on Azure
Bam! Microsoft announces the preview of VMware vSphere on Microsoft Azure. It will run on bare-metal on Azure hardware, beside other Azure services. The general availability is expected in 2018.
My two cents
This is the second big announcement about VMware stuff on Azure (don’t forget VMware Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure). And although I believe, that this is something that Microsoft wants to offer to get more customers on Azure, this can be a great chance for VMware. VMware customers don’t have to go to Amazon, when they want to host VMware at a major public cloud provider, especially if they are already Microsoft Azure/ O365 customers. This is a pretty bold move from Microsoft and similar to VMware Cloud on AWS. I’m curious to get more details about this.