VMware – the leading virtualization and private cloud provider, in a sudden turn of events, retaliated to Microsoft’s efforts of taking away its customers, saying that the customers running its software on Azure cloud will have to forego VMware support.
Microsoft had recently made an announcement for Azure Migrate service – an easy method of moving workloads on VMware’s hypervisors from on-premise to Azure cloud.
At that time, Corey Sanders, Director of Compute, Azure, announced the preview VMware virtualization on Azure, a bare-metal solution that runs the full VMware stack on Azure hardware, co-located with other Azure services, in association with VMware certified partners.
Senior Vice President, Product Development, Cloud Services, VMware – Ajay Patel in a blog said that no VMware-certified partner names have been mentioned nor have any partners collaborated with VMware in engineering this offering.
He also mentioned, “VMware can neither endorse nor recommend Microsoft’s Azure virtualization solution, and will not support customers that use it.”
VMware believes that public cloud environments need joint engineering to run enterprise workloads and said that they cannot support an unsupported and non-engineered solution, which is not optimized for the VMware stack.
He also quoted VMware cloud on AWS and IBM cloud for VMware solutions as the recommended partner offerings.
Taking a dig at Microsoft, Patel also mentioned that Microsoft recognizing the leadership position of VMware’s offering and exploring support for VMware on Azure as a superior and necessary solution for customers over Hyper-V or native Azure Stack environments is understandable but, we do not believe this approach will offer customers a good solution to their hybrid or multi-cloud future.
Microsoft will face a tough time getting customers for their VMware virtualization on Azure, as no customer will be willing to take a non-supportive service, unless the mysterious VMware certified partner assures customers on complete support for vSphere and other wares.
It would be interesting to see what Microsoft has to say now. Stay tuned for latest updates.
