Azure VMware Solution

The VMware Cloud family of multi-cloud solutions solves that dilemma by providing compute, storage, networking, and management infrastructure on all major public clouds that is fully consistent with your VMware private cloud. For customers considering Azure for their cloud use cases, this Buyers Guide will show how Azure VMware Solution (AVS) delivers VMware infrastructure – virtual machines for traditional applications and desktops, plus Kubernetes containers for modern cloud-native apps - running in Azure to speed cloud adoption while avoiding operational disruptions. For each use case, we have provided a comparison with the native Azure infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) public cloud platform to show the benefits of Azure VMware Solution.

 

Use Case #1: Cloud Migration

To migrate applications from your on-premises data center to the Azure cloud for multiple reasons an upcoming lease expiration a Finance directive to move from CapEx spending to OpEx spending; or simply a top-down mandate to move everything to the cloud. When migration speed is critical, only a streamlined “lift and shift” approach is feasible because replatforming and refactoring applications to adapt to the cloud’s particular IaaS platform is slow and expensive, often taking years. The difficulty of modifying applications and the virtual machines that house them is apparent when you consider that every element of the application’s infrastructure changes when moved to the cloud – compute, storage, and networking – as well as services for management, monitoring, high availability, backups, and disaster recovery

VMware Cloud multi-cloud solutions like Azure VMware Solution make “lift and shift” migrations easy by deploying a VMware Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) stack on bare-metal servers running in Microsoft’s VMware Cloud Verified Azure data centers. The VMware SDDC provides a fully VMware-consistent platform of vSphere (compute), VMware vSAN™ (storage), and VMware NSX-T™ (networking) so your applications and VMs can easily migrate to Azure with no replatforming or refactoring needed. Azure VMware Solution uses familiar VMware management tools like vCenter and the vSphere Client, so all your operational skills and processes work seamlessly. Azure VMware Solution also includes VMware HCX to extend your on-premises network to your VMware SDDC on Azure to enable bi-directional bulk, and even live migration of applications and virtual machines. By stretching your on-premises Layer-2 network to Azure, HCX lets you avoid the complexity of changing the IP addresses of migrated VMs. 

Azure VMware Solution supports a broad and growing set of VMware attached services to keep your operations in the Azure cloud at operational and functional parity with your on-premises data center. VMware vRealize Operations, vRealize Network Insight, Site Recovery Manager, SD-WAN, NSX Advanced Load Balancer are all available with Azure VMware Solution to make your move to the Azure cloud as seamless as possible.

 

 

Use Case #1: Cloud Migration

To migrate applications from your on-premises data center to the Azure cloud for multiple reasons: an upcoming lease expiration; a Finance directive to move from CapEx spending to OpEx spending; or simply a top-down mandate to move everything to the cloud. When migration speed is critical, only a streamlined “lift and shift” approach is feasible because replatforming and refactoring applications to adapt to the cloud’s particular IaaS platform is slow and expensive, often taking years. The difficulty of modifying applications and the virtual machines that house them is apparent when you consider that every element of the application’s infrastructure changes when moved to the cloud – compute, storage, and networking – as well as services for management, monitoring, high availability, backups, and disaster recovery

VMware Cloud multi-cloud solutions like Azure VMware Solution make “lift and shift” migrations easy by deploying a VMware Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) stack on bare-metal servers running in Microsoft’s VMware Cloud Verified Azure data centers. The VMware SDDC provides a fully VMware-consistent platform of vSphere (compute), VMware vSAN™ (storage), and VMware NSX-T™ (networking) so your applications and VMs can easily migrate to Azure with no replatforming or refactoring needed. Azure VMware Solution uses familiar VMware management tools like vCenter and the vSphere Client, so all your operational skills and processes work seamlessly. Azure VMware Solution also includes VMware HCX to extend your on-premises network to your VMware SDDC on Azure to enable bi-directional bulk, and even live migration of applications and virtual machines. By stretching your on-premises Layer-2 network to Azure, HCX lets you avoid the complexity of changing the IP addresses of migrated VMs.

Use Case #2: Data Center Expansion

When your data center hits capacity limits due to seasonal demand spikes or just steady organic growth, public clouds offer a compelling expansion solution. However, the allure of such “cloud-bursting” can lead to frustration when the proprietary infrastructure of public clouds blocks relocation of on-premises apps without a major, and one-way, refactoring effort. VMware Cloud platforms, like Azure VMware Solution, have made rapid data center expansion and “cloud-bursting” possible by providing VMware SDDC infrastructure in public clouds that is fully consistent and compatible with the VMware infrastructure you already use. You can now treat Azure regions worldwide as extensions to your data center, ready to run instances of your critical applications without modifications, so you can easily handle short-lived demand surges or even make permanent capacity increases or decreases.

Use Case #3: Application Modernization

Azure VMware Solution makes it easy to migrate your applications directly to Azure with no changes, such simple “lifting and shifting” is rarely optimal. Once your applications are in the Azure cloud, you will want to take advantage of the hundreds of powerful Azure Services to modernize and extend them. In fact, modernization is the top application priority for enterprises (see sidebar) and Azure VMware Solution is an ideal platform for application transformation with direct high-speed private connections to Azure Services for databases, storage, identity, security, and monitoring. Migrating and extending your infrastructure to public clouds offers a great opportunity to adopt a cloud-native architecture for new or mission-critical applications. Azure VMware Solution provides several paths you can take to accelerate and simplify modernization of your applications with microservice architectures built on containers, Kubernetes, and serverless technologies. You can deploy a complete Kubernetes infrastructure in your Azure VMware Solution SDDC using the VMware Tanzu™ portfolio of products or other Kubernetes distributions. For a more incremental path to cloud-native modernization, you can extend traditional applications in Azure VMware Solution virtual machines to use Azure cloud-native Platform-as-a-Service features for data, AI/ML, Kubernetes
containers.

Use Case #4: Cloud Desktop Virtualization

The most common mode of operation for virtual desktops is now hybrid, where enterprises host desktop workloads on both on-premises infrastructure and public clouds5. Managing such a mixed virtual desktop environment is made far easier with a single, consistent virtual desktop and application software stack extending from the hypervisor to the desktop session broker and management layers – especially when the hypervisor is vSphere, used by more customers for VDI and server-based computing than any other6. That is exactly the solution provided by VMware Horizon, our platform for delivering virtual desktops and apps efficiently and securely across hybrid cloud for the best end-user digital workspace experience. VMware Horizon on Azure VMware Solution lets you combine on-premises and Azure-hosted virtual desktops and apps into a uniform pool with fully consistent user and management experiences.

Use Case #5: Disaster Recovery to the Cloud

Public clouds are attracting production IT infrastructure, they have also become the preferred platform for disaster recovery solutions. You no longer need to reserve expensive, but idle, capacity in your own data centers to provide disaster recovery infrastructure when public clouds offer fast network connections, low-cost storage, geographic diversity, and immense capacity. As with migrating production workloads to the cloud, the main obstacle to adopting disaster recovery using the cloud providers’ native DR services has been the platform inconsistency between your vSphere infrastructure and public clouds that use entirely different platforms. If a disaster occurs, the virtual machines replicated to the cloud would require conversion to the cloud’s own hypervisor platform before they could be restored – not a task you want to take on during a crisis. VMware Cloud platforms, like Azure VMware Solution, offer a better approach for disaster recovery to the cloud that allows your VM replicas to be recovered on fully consistent VMware SDDC infrastructure with no conversion needed. Disaster recovery procedures are greatly simplified and made more trustworthy. 

I hope this has been informative and thank you for reading!