Microsoft Azure VMware Solution: The Best of Both Worlds

With AVS, unlock seamless integration with the VMware environment and run native VMware workloads on Microsoft Azure.

Wanting to have the best of both worlds is not a bad objective. There are times we want to enjoy the advantages of two quite different things at the same time. My daughter moved into a New York City apartment a few years ago that was walking distance to Central Park. We felt this was the best of both worlds. She enjoys the benefits of city life at her doorstep, with great restaurants, galleries, theaters and more, but she also loves nature from growing up in the countryside. Having Central Park nearby gives her that respite from the fast pace of the city. Much the same, a hybrid cloud environment brings this “best of both worlds” advantage with flexibility and scalability for organizations that need to run workloads natively between an on-premises cloud and a public cloud solution supporting diverse management plains and workload portability. This can come at a cost since public and private cloud environments have different implementation practices and dissimilar management tools.

For customers utilizing a VMware-based cloud who want to optimize their Microsoft workloads by running them in an Azure environment, Azure VMware Solution (AVS) is the best of both worlds. You can unlock the seamless integration with the VMware environment and run native VMware workloads on Microsoft Azure, managing both on-prem and off-prem cloud environments from the VMware management interface. AVS provides flexibility and scalability for simplifying disaster recovery, expanding established footprint and utilizing existing skills and tools IT teams already use.

Dell Technologies can help customers here in multiple ways, starting with handling Azure license subscriptions to give customers a single vendor with which to deal. And with Dell’s Implementation Service for Microsoft Azure VMware Solution, our professional services team helps customers integrate their existing VMware environment with Microsoft Azure cloud by extending the on-premises network topology and accelerating migrations to a dedicated cloud on Azure, leveraging a mix of public and dedicated infrastructure resources. From here, users can leverage existing VMware tools and operations with the flexibility of utilizing Microsoft Azure services such as disaster recovery capabilities. With Azure’s global presence and redundancy options, you have the ability to ensure high availability for VMware workloads and set up disaster recovery solutions in Azure, protecting critical applications and data.

AVS is beneficial for organizations to reduce and consolidate their data center footprints, rapidly scale capacity on demand and use Azure services for mobility of applications, as well as to capitalize on existing VMware skills and tools for operations. With the advantages of AVS, there is less of a need to maintain additional on-prem hardware, reducing capital expenditure. Organizations can optimize cost though Azure’s pay-as-you-go pricing model, for ease of scaling resources up or down as needed for seasonal workloads or unpredictable spikes in resource requirements. This feature also helps reduce operation time since IT teams can use the processes and tools with which they are already familiar.

Moving toward AVS is the best of both worlds. Integrating VMware with Microsoft Azure native management, security and services give organizations the upper hand to enjoy the advantages of two cloud environments, on-premises and off-premises, at the same time with ease. AVS has additional benefits related to cost by applying existing Windows Server, SQL Server licenses or Linux subscriptions to the Azure Hybrid Benefit licensing offer, helping migrate and save to Azure. AVS is a win-win solution with benefits of a VMware environment and Microsoft Azure cloud solution.

The next time I visit my daughter, I’m going to enjoy a cup of coffee at an outdoor café and watch the hustle and bustle around me, then take a leisurely walk in Central Park. What is your “best of both worlds?”

Click here to learn more about Azure VMware Solution and check out a video overview here.

About the Author: Karen London

Karen London is a Global Consulting Enablement Lead for Dell Technologies Multicloud, Data Protection, and Business Continuity Professional Service’s practices and an IT Multicloud transformation industry expert. She provides strategy and thought leadership, supporting Dell teams who drive practice & offer development, delivery enablement. and communities of expertise across the Americas, LATAM, EMEA and APJC regions. Karen acts as a trusted advisor, contributing to offer development in coordination with the Services PG teams. Her responsible for the globalization of cloud service practices in theaters around the world help her ensure delivery organization reach technical readiness enabling delivery teams with the right skills and training for project delivery success. Karen is known for her leadership skills to achieve results for Dell stakeholders and customers all driven by a demonstrated collaborative work style. Karen lives in New Jersey and loves cooking, gardening and spending time with her family and friends especially her husband, five children and two grandsons.