Microsoft recently announced new services to help enterprises move existing on-premise VMware workloads to Azure – Azure Migrate and VMware virtualization on Azure.
The new services have been designed to help developers at every stage of VMware migration to Azure.
Microsoft’s intelligent cloud gives enterprises access to supercomputing powers on pay-as-you-go basis, which makes it popular amongst both small and large enterprises. VMware, on the other hand, is a leader when it comes to virtualization.
Azure Migrate is touted as an appropriate means of moving VMware workloads to the Azure cloud. The free service will be launched on November 27th, and will be available to all the customers of Azure.
Azure migrate will support multi-server application migration unlike other cloud vendors with single server migration capabilities. It does so through discovery and assessment, migration and resource, and cost optimization. The new service will thus, discover and analyze all VMware workloads running on the private datacenters and then provide a way to migrate it to the public cloud using Azure Site Recovery service.
Microsoft also allows integration of VMware workloads with Azure services, which means customers can use their Azure services with VMware workloads without requiring any migration or deployment, enabling data management and security across cloud and on-premises. This consists of Azure Backup, Update/Configuration management, Azure Site Recovery, and Azure Security Center.
While Azure Migrate will support migration of on-premises VMware workloads to cloud, VMware virtualization on Azure is a bare metal solution that will have the capacity to run the full VMware stack on Azure hardware. Microsoft is offering this service in collaboration with VMware-certified partners and expects to make it available in the coming year.
The new services came a week before AWS’s annual conference – re: Invent, in Las Vegas. Microsoft has given another edge to its cloud service portfolio by adding these services. It is a strategic move as it will also boost Microsoft hybrid cloud services, as Azure Migrate will give customers the choice to move some, but not necessarily all their data to the cloud.
