Run your VMware natively on Azure with Azure VMware Solutions

Today the Microsoft Azure team announced the Azure VMware Solutions, which allow you to run VMware natively on Azure. VMware Solution on Azure by CloudSimple is a fully managed service that lets you run the VMware platform in Azure. This solution includes vSphere, vCenter, vSAN, NSX-T, and similar tools. VMware environment runs natively on Azure Bare Metal infrastructure, on Azure cloud locations. The service includes all the features required to consume the VMware platforms efficiently and securely. The solution is delivered by Microsoft, verified by VMware, and run on Azure infrastructure.

This allows you to move or extend your on-premises VMware environment to Microsoft Azure. You can seamlessly move VMware workloads to Azure and integrate with your VMware management environment, using the same and existing management tools. This gives you time to modernize your workloads with native Azure services. This extends the Microsoft hybrid cloud offerings for products like Azure Stack, Azure Stack HCI, and more.

VMware Solution on Azure by CloudSimple

Features

• On-demand self-service provisioning of VMware cloud environments. Ability to add and remove capacity on demand
• VMware platform deployment, upgrade, management plane backup, health/capacity monitoring, alerting, troubleshooting, and remediation.
• Underlay networking services required to enable VMware, including L2/L3 services and firewall rule management.
• Edge-type networking services, including VPN, Public IP, and Internet Gateways. These edge services run on Azure and carry the corresponding security and DDoS protection of Azure.
• Capacity reservation to lower costs.
• High-speed, low-latency connectivity to Azure and on-premises.
• Solution architectures for customers to consume Azure services in an integrated fashion, take advantage of this unique “VMware cloud in a public cloud” architecture. These Azure services include Azure AD, storage,
• application gateways, and others.
• Infrastructure is fully dedicated to you and is physically isolated from the infrastructure of other customers.
• Management features such as activity management, usage, billing/metering, and user management.
• 24×7 customer support.

(Source Microsoft Docs)

This will open a couple of crucial scenarios for our customers.

• Data Center retirement or migration – If you need to retire your datacenter and you need a fast and straightforward way to move your existing VMware workloads, Azure is a great place to host these workloads without rearchitecting them. This will give you time to modernize your applications in the mid and long term
• Expansion on demand – If you are running your VMware environment and you need more capacity on demand, you can extend it to Azure.
• Disaster Recovery – You can use Azure as your recovery site for your on-premises VMware workloads
• Virtual Desktops – If you are running a VDI solution on top of VMware, you are also able to host the infrastructure in Azure.
• Hosting High-Performance Applications – The CloudSimple solution provides a hyper-converged architecture designed to run high-performance workloads
• Hybrid Cloud – It opens up scenarios for companies to run hybrid cloud scenarios, without the need to switch all your tools and to rearchitect your workloads

If you want to know more about VMware Solution on Azure by CloudSimple, you can check out the Microsoft docs.

Integration into Azure

The VMware solutions on Azure, are not just isolated from the rest of your Azure environment. VMware on Azure by CloudSimple is integrated into Azure, which means it allows you to leverage Azure Express Route and even the Azure Resource Manager to deploy virtual machines on your VMware host running in Azure. This will enable you to create new virtual machines from your VMware administration tools like vCenter, but also within the Azure Portal or using Azure Resource Manager templates.

Pricing

In terms of pricing, you will be paying per VMware node in Azure, and you will get charged by Microsoft for it. You can use your existing Azure Enterprise Agreement precommitments for it.

We have two different instances available depending on the size you need, the CS28 and the larger CS36 nodes. These include CPU cores, RAM, NVME Cache, and useable all-flash storage. The minimum of nodes you will need is three instances per cluster. You can also make use of the Reserved options for 1 or 3 years to save up to 50%. You can also use the Azure Hybrid Benefit to use your existing Windows Server licenses, and you can also make use of the Extended Security Update options for Windows Server 2008 / 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2008 / 2008 R2.

The storage pricing is the useable storage in vSAN. If you want to know more about pricing, check out the Azure pricing page for Azure VMware Solution by CloudSimple.

What are your thoughts about these announcements? Let me know in the comments!