Azure for Organizations Invested in VMware

• Azure services applicable to VMware customers are limited to server management functionality likely already provided by VMware-centric solutions.
• Opportunities are generally limited to migrating VMware workloads to Azure VMs or running select Azure services within VMware VMs on-premises.
• To garner benefits from Azure, customers need to modify existing applications or write new applications.
• Azure is slated to eventually offer hosted VMware deployments, but few details are available.

For organizations that are already heavily invested in VMware technology on-premises, there are a limited range of opportunities to exploit Azure, unless the organization plans a large-scale migration away from VMware technology to Azure’s Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or Platform as a Service (PaaS) technology stacks.

Azure and VMware

VMware’s on-premises hardware virtualization and VM management technologies are well-established among many customers and remain used by numerous organizations, even if those organizations are primarily virtualizing Windows Server OSs. Due to architectural differences between VMware and Microsoft’s Azure VM infrastructure, migrating VMware VMs from on-premises to Azure is a non-trivial exercise beyond the scope of this report.