Category Archives: Azure VMware Solution

Impact of Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware and Microsoft’s alternative solutions

The tech industry witnessed one of the most significant mergers in recent times in November 2023, with Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware. This historic deal, now known as “VMware by Broadcom,” immediately raised questions and sparked interest among customers and industry analysts. Indeed, in an ever-evolving technological landscape, the repercussions of such a merger extend well beyond the walls of VMware and Broadcom, directly affecting existing customers and the global market for cloud services and IT infrastructure. Amidst a sea of changes, including shifts in licensing policies and potential uncertainty about the continuity of products and services offered, a clear need emerges for organizations to carefully assess their options.

It is in this context that Microsoft emerges as a key player, offering alternative solutions that promise not only to mitigate the risks associated with this major acquisition but also to provide new opportunities for growth and innovation. With a wide range of cloud services, virtualization tools, and infrastructure solutions, Microsoft stands out as a solid reference point for those seeking stability and reliability in a rapidly evolving IT landscape.

This article aims to explore in detail the impact of Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, highlighting the main concerns of customers and outlining how Microsoft’s proposed alternative solutions can represent a strategic way out for organizations facing this significant change.

Main Customer Concerns

The following paragraphs report the main concerns raised by customers following Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware.

Transition from Perpetual Licenses to Subscriptions

A significant change introduced by Broadcom involves the transition from perpetual licenses, once a cornerstone of VMware’s offering, to a subscription-based model. This move raises concerns about long-term costs, as the recurring expenses of subscriptions can accumulate and exceed the one-time costs of perpetual licenses. Moreover, there is fear that customers may lose control over software versions and be subject to additional costs for updates.

Lack of Price Transparency

Customers express concerns about the lack of transparency in the pricing structure post-acquisition. Broadcom has announced reductions in “unit cost” but without providing clear details, raising fears of hidden costs and included services not requested. This uncertainty makes it difficult for customers to predict their future expenses.

Risk of Product Discontinuity

Broadcom’s history of optimizing product portfolios through the elimination of less profitable offerings has fueled concern over the potential discontinuity of popular VMware products. A case in point was the announcement of the end of availability of the free hypervisor vSphere (ESXi 7.x and 8.x), which has created uncertainty and pushed customers to evaluate alternative solutions.

Reduced Choice and Vendor Lock-in

The elimination of some products and increased dependence on Broadcom’s offerings can limit customers’ options, increasing the risk of lock-in with a single vendor. This scenario raises concerns about a possible increase in costs and a reduction in bargaining power.

Concerns about Reduced R&D

There is a strong concern that Broadcom’s historically cost-cutting approach could limit investments in research and development (R&D), compromising the innovation that has characterized VMware’s success. Memories of past acquisitions, where Broadcom cut R&D budgets, fuel fears about the future competitiveness and vitality of VMware products.

Impact on the VMware Ecosystem

Forrester Research Prediction

Forrester Research has predicted that about 20% of VMware’s enterprise customers may decide to abandon the VMware stack, driven by concerns related to the acquisition. This significant percentage of customers is looking for alternatives to meet their needs in areas such as virtualization, cloud environment management, remote access for end-users, and hyper-converged infrastructure solutions.

VMware Product Strategy and Focus

VMware has responded by simplifying its product portfolio, focusing the offering on three main areas: VMware Cloud Foundation, VMware vSphere Foundation, and additional services. This simplification aims to make it clearer for customers the technological path to follow, maintaining unchanged integrations with major cloud providers such as Azure, AWS, and Oracle. Moreover, for smaller implementations, VMware has kept the vSphere Standard and the vSphere Essentials Plus Kit, offering accessible options without overwhelming customers with an overly broad range of products.

Pricing and Offers

Despite the changes, VMware maintains a constant in its pricing strategy and offerings, opting for a subscription model that allows customers to align costs with the actual use of the software. This approach includes:

Subscription model: Allows paying for software based on actual use, aligning costs with real needs and avoiding large initial capital expenses (CAPEX). With terms of 1, 3, and 5 years, it offers the possibility to choose the duration of the subscription that best suits the organization’s needs and budget forecasts.
Core-based pricing: Rates are determined by the number of CPU cores used by the virtual machines, ensuring a cost allocation proportional to the resources used. A key aspect of the pricing model is the minimum threshold, which is equal to 16 cores per CPU.

Microsoft’s Alternative Solutions

Microsoft emerges as a key partner for customers looking for alternatives, offering innovative solutions for the migration and modernization of IT infrastructure. With an approach focused on innovation and flexibility, Microsoft primarily proposes the following solutions that can meet different needs and scenarios.

Azure Stack HCI: Bringing Azure into your data center with a hybrid infrastructure

Azure Stack HCI is Microsoft’s solution for creating an efficient and modern hyper-converged (HCI) infrastructure, suitable for running workloads in an on-premises environment with tight integration with Azure services. This solution is designed to facilitate the modernization of hybrid data centers, allowing users to enjoy a cohesive and familiar Azure experience even on-premises. Azure Stack HCI aims to simplify IT infrastructure management while improving efficiency and operational agility. For a detailed exploration of the Microsoft Azure Stack HCI solution, I invite you to read this article or watch this video. Additionally, for scenarios where a constant connection cannot be guaranteed (“disconnected” scenarios), it is possible to foresee the implementation of virtualization, storage, and network management solutions that leverage recent and innovative technologies included in Windows Server. For the latter, the new version 2025 will soon be launched.

Figure 1 – Azure Stack HCI overview

Azure VMware Solution (AVS): VMware in Microsoft’s data centers for enterprise realities

Azure VMware Solution leverages VMware technology on Azure to maintain symmetry with on-premises VMware environments, thereby accelerating the migration of VMware workloads to the Azure cloud with minimal adjustments. AVS facilitates the management of a hybrid cloud environment, offering private clouds in Azure, built on dedicated Azure infrastructure and bare-metal. Managed and supported directly by the Azure team and validated by VMware, this solution frees organizations from managing infrastructure and software. AVS includes essential VMware licenses such as vSphere, vSAN, NSX, and vMotion (VMware HCX), significantly simplifying migration and integration with Azure. For more details on the solution, you can consult this article on How to natively run VMware workloads in Azure.

Moreover, the Azure VMware Solution was recently made available in the Azure region of Northern Italy. This expansion allows customers in Italy to seamlessly integrate their VMware workloads with Azure services, leveraging the global scale, security, and performance of Azure while maintaining the VMware tools and skills they are accustomed to.

Figure 2 – Azure VMware Solution (AVS) overview

A particularly relevant aspect for organizations using Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2 systems is the continuity of support in terms of security updates. Azure VMware Solution offers a significant advantage in this area: Extended Security Updates (ESU) for these systems are available at no additional cost when run on Azure VMware Solution. The provision of free ESU in Azure VMware Solution removes a common concern among many organizations regarding the costs and complexity associated with maintaining older systems in a secure environment. This approach allows companies to plan their migration and modernization of workloads with greater peace of mind, knowing that their Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2 systems will continue to receive the necessary security updates for another 3 years during the transition to more recent technologies.

Azure VMware Solution not only facilitates the migration and integration of VMware environments with the Azure cloud but also provides essential support for managing legacy operating systems, offering a secure path to technological innovation and modernization without compromising security or operational stability.

Azure IaaS and PaaS: Migration and Modernization with Azure

For organizations aiming for a more radical modernization, Microsoft proposes migration to Azure IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and PaaS (Platform as a Service). This strategy allows migrating, restructuring, and rewriting applications leveraging modern architectural models. Azure IaaS ensures the management and execution of applications on a reliable cloud infrastructure, with a focus on security and compliance. Azure PaaS options further accelerate application development, providing a rich variety of tools. These platforms facilitate the quick creation of applications, support for development across different platforms, and the use of advanced resources in a cost-effective manner thanks to a payment model based on actual use. Modernization with Azure IaaS and PaaS offers a smooth transition to a flexible infrastructure, eliminating the need for VMware licenses.

Figure 3 – Moving to Azure IaaS and PaaS

Conclusions

Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware represents a significant turning point for the tech industry, marking the beginning of a new era of uncertainty and opportunity. While this merger raises legitimate concerns among customers regarding the continuity of products, price transparency, and the safeguarding of IT investments, it also opens the door to new horizons of growth and innovation. In this context of change, Microsoft stands out as a reference point, offering robust alternative solutions that not only directly address the concerns raised by this situation but also provide an opportunity for organizations to renew and enhance their IT infrastructures with cutting-edge technologies. The solutions proposed by Microsoft, including Azure Stack HCI, Azure VMware Solution (AVS), and migration and modernization options with Azure IaaS and PaaS, represent a strategic response to the challenges posed by the acquisition. These offerings allow organizations to achieve operational continuity, flexibility, and access to an innovative ecosystem that supports growth and innovation.

Activate the Disaster Recovery of your workloads quickly and easily thanks to Azure VMware Solution

In an era where companies increasingly depend on computer systems for their functioning, data protection and business continuity are elements that must necessarily be taken into consideration. Unforeseen events such as natural disasters, hardware failures, cyber attacks and human errors can cause disruption of IT services, resulting in significant financial losses. This is where the Disaster Recovery plan comes into play (DR), that allows companies to quickly restore IT services and minimize the impact of unexpected events on the business. For large companies with heterogeneous and complex IT environments, it can be particularly challenging to activate a Disaster Recovery plan. This article explains how Azure VMware Solution (AVS), thanks to its characteristics, can be the ideal solution for developing a Disaster Recovery plan quickly and easily.

The importance of a DR plan in the company

The presence of a good Disaster Recovery strategy may seem obvious, but many companies continue to neglect its importance. Among the main factors to be considered for the DR we find:

Business continuity: DR plan allows companies to quickly restore IT systems, minimizing the impact of unforeseen events and ensuring business continuity.
Minimization of financial losses: IT service outages can cause significant financial loss. The DR plan allows you to minimize these losses, restoring IT systems as quickly as possible.
Regulatory compliance: many regulations require companies to have a DR plan in place to protect data and ensure business continuity.
Customer trust: business continuity is an important factor in customer trust. A DR plan can demonstrate to customers that the company can handle unexpected events and ensure continuity of services.

Challenges to face in the activation of a DR plan

The importance is understood, however, it is true that companies often find themselves facing various challenges when they have to activate a Disaster Recovery plan (DR). Some of the more common challenges are:

Recovery site availability: usually Disaster Recovery (DR) is activated at a dedicated recovery site separate from the corporate headquarters. This recovery site may be located in a different geographical area to provide greater protection against catastrophic events that could affect the geographical area where the company headquarters is located. The recovery site must be adequate, equipped and configured to support critical business operations, so that these can be restored as quickly as possible.
Recovery times: the time it takes to restore IT systems is one of the biggest challenges in the event of a service outage. Businesses must do everything possible to reduce downtime and restore IT services as quickly as possible.
Data access: in the event that the IT service disruption is caused by a natural disaster, a cyber attack or human error, access to data may be compromised. It is important that businesses protect their data and that backups are kept in a safe place, to ensure the recovery of information.
Staff training: company personnel must be adequately trained to be able to manage recovery procedures effectively. This requires an investment in staff training and development.

Introduction to the adoption of Azure

Microsoft Azure was designed from the ground up to help customers reduce costs, complexity and to improve the reliability and efficiency of your IT environment.

Figure 1 – The comprehensive approach to building an infrastructure designed for different workloads

There is no one-size-fits-all way to adopt cloud solutions, but it makes sense to give customers the ability to embrace the cloud at their own pace, in some cases even adopting the same technological solutions that they are currently using in their on-premises environment. Provide platform symmetry (on-premises – cloud), where appropriate, it is useful for addressing workload migration scenarios, but also to activate Disaster Recovery plans.

In this article it will be considered Azure VMware Solution (AVS) the designed service, built and supported by Microsoft, and approved by VMware, which allows customers to use physical VMware vSphere clusters hosted in Azure.

Azure VMware Solution: why use it for Disaster Recovery

Azure VMware Solution is a service that allows the provisioning and execution of an environment VMware Cloud Foundation full on Azure. VMware Cloud Foundation is VMware's hybrid cloud platform for managing virtual machines and orchestrating containers, where the entire stack is based on a hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI).

Figure 2 – Azure VMware Solution overview

This architecture model ensures consistent infrastructure and operation across any private and public cloud, including Microsoft Azure. The solution Azure VMware allows customers to adopt a full set of VMware features, with the guarantee of holding the validation "VMware Cloud Verified". This solution helps to achieve consistency, performance and interoperability for existing VMware workloads, without sacrificing speed, scalability and availability of Azure global infrastructure. Among the main scenarios of adoption of Azure VMware Solution we find the Disaster recovery.

Talking to enterprise customers, we see a variety of drivers driving the adoption of a solution such as Azure VMware Solution to activate an effective DR strategy:

Speed: AVS allows you to implement DR plans quickly and efficiently thanks to a hybrid cloud architecture, virtual machine replication and advanced automation features you can adopt. These elements allow companies to reduce the time required to activate a DR plan and to restore critical operations in the event of a disaster.
Costs and complexity: Azure VMware Solution can help reduce the cost of setting up a disaster recovery site (DR). In fact,, AVS enables companies to extend their on-premises VMware solutions to Azure, creating a hybrid cloud DR environment that offers flexibility and scalability. Instead of purchasing expensive hardware and infrastructure for a separate DR site, companies can use Azure as a recovery site and pay only for the cloud resources they actually use while enabling DR. This allows companies to reduce the initial costs of DR activation and to simplify the IT infrastructure with consequent benefits also from the point of view of maintenance. Furthermore, thanks to AVS it is possible to resize the infrastructure dynamically, based on your needs, and ensure greater operational efficiency.
People, processes and tools: AVS lets you leverage your existing investments in skills and tools to manage your on-premises VMware environments. To implement disaster recovery plans using Azure VMware Solution, it is possible to adopt native VMware solutions or third-party solutions. In fact,, Microsoft, in order to guarantee its customers the opportunity to make the most of the investments made in skills and technologies, has collaborated with some of the main partners in the sector, to ensure integration and support. For more information on this, you can consult the article "Disaster recovery with Azure VMware Solution – Cloud Community".

Conclusions

Azure VMware Solution represents an ideal solution to address Disaster Recovery cases (DR), for enterpise realities, thanks to its flexibility, scalability and reliability. Using this solution, companies can create environments in Azure that are compatible and integrated with on-premises VMware infrastructure, ensuring business continuity and emergency recovery in the event of a disaster. Furthermore, the solution allows you to simplify and automate DR management, reducing costs and increasing recovery speed. Therefore, if you are looking for a solution to implement efficient and effective DR plans, Azure VMware Solution is definitely a solution to consider.

The Azure VMware Solution's evolution for running VMware workloads on Azure

Azure VMware Solution (AVS) is the service designed, built and supported by Microsoft, and approved by VMware, that allows customers to easily extend or migrate fully to Azure VMware workloads residing in an on-premises environment. Microsoft recently introduced a series of interesting innovations regarding Azure VMware Solution that pave the way for new adoption scenarios and make it even more complete. This article reports the main aspects that have undergone an evolution and the new features recently introduced in Azure VMware Solution.

Azure VMware Solution allows you to deploy a VMware private cloud, in Software-Defined Data Center mode (SDDC), in Microsoft Azure environment.

Figure 1 – Azure VMware Solution overview

Main adoption scenarios

The adoption of Azure VMware Solution is usually contemplated to address the following scenarios:

Need to expand your datacenter
Disaster recovery and business continuity
Application Modernization
Reduction, consolidation or decommissioning of your datacenter

Benefits of the solution

Among the main benefits of adopting this solution it is possible to mention:

Ability to take advantage of investments already made in the skills and tools for managing on-premises VMware environments.
Modernization of your application workloads by adopting Azure services and without facing interruptions.
Economic convenience for running Windows and SQL Server workloads. In fact,, being in effect an Azure service, Azure VMware Solution supports Azure Hybrid Benefits, that allow you to maximize the investments made in Windows Server and SQL Server licenses in an on-premises environment, during migration or extension to Azure. Furthermore, customers who adopt this solution are entitled to three years of free extended security updates for Windows Server and SQL Server.

For more details about Azure VMware Solution (AVS) you can refer to this article.

Evolution and news of the solution

To further enrich the capabilities of the AVS solution and to make it even more effective, Microsoft has recently introduced the innovations reported in the following paragraphs.

Presence in 24 region of Azure

Since the launch of AVS, happened about two years ago, Microsoft has worked to extend the availability of this solution globally and it is now available in 24 different regions of Azure, more than any other cloud service provider. To consult the geographical availability of AVS it is possible to consult this page.

Figure 2 - Presence of AVS globally

VMware vSphere 7.0

All Azure VMware solution deployments can adopt VMware vSphere 7.0, the latest version of the suite that offers a full range of enterprise virtualization features.

Availability of Azure NetApp Files datastores

Workloads that require intensive use of storage, even in the AVS environment, can take advantage of integration with Azure NetApp Files. By adopting this solution, you can easily scale to increase storage capacities, thus overcoming the limits of local storage instances made available by vSAN. For further details please visit the Microsoft's official documentation.

Jetstream DR with Azure NetApp Files datastore support

Microsoft, in order to guarantee its customers the opportunity to make the most of the investments made in skills and technologies, has worked with some of the main partners offering disaster recovery solutions, one of them is Jetstream. The adoption of JetStream to develop DR plans is interesting as Azure Blob Storage is used to keep copies of virtual machines and related data. JetStream DR is now also able to replicate and automate recovery using Azure NetApp Files datastores.

VMware Cloud Director Services

Customers who have adopted the AVS solution, using the Microsoft Enterprise agreement, can purchase the service VMware Cloud Director from VMware. This allows us to connect to the AVS private cloud to create and manage private virtual data centers. Furthermore, you can take advantage of the features offered for migrating local VMware workloads to the Azure VMware Solution private cloud. For further details you can consult this documentation.

VMware vRealize Log Insight Cloud

The service VMware vRealize Log Insight Cloud it is also available for AVS. This solution provides centralized log management, detailed operational visibility and the ability to carry out in-depth analyzes. Thanks to this solution it is possible to increase the operational efficiency of IT departments, reduce costs resulting from unplanned downtime and provide in-depth visibility into security events.

“Public IP to NSX Edge” available in 17 region of Azure

Client applications running on AVS frequently require both outbound and inbound Internet connectivity. Thanks to this new feature, it is possible to adopt three different models to ensure incoming and outgoing Internet access to resources hosted in the Azure VMware Solution private cloud.

VMware Cloud Universal Program

Microsoft has extended the partnership with VMware by adding support to the program VMware Cloud Universal, a flexible purchasing and consumption program for the adoption of hybrid and multi-cloud strategies. This will allow customers to purchase Azure VMware Solution as part of the VMware Cloud Universal program.

Conclusions

Companies are required to adopt flexible and modern solutions in the IT field to achieve greater stability, continuity and resilience of the main application workloads that support their core business. Azure VMware solution has all the features to respond in the best way to these needs and the numerous improvements introduced, result of the joint work between Microsoft and VMware, make it more and more modern, solid and reliable.

Disaster recovery with Azure VMware Solution

The adoption of flexible and cutting-edge solutions to achieve greater stability, continuity and resilience of the main application workloads that support the company business is an important goal to pursue. Azure VMware Solution (AVS) is the service designed, made and supported by Microsoft and approved by VMware, which allows customers to use physical VMware vSphere clusters hosted in Azure. This article describes the main Azure VMware Solution adoption scenarios to meet disaster recovery needs.

The Azure VMware solution can be contemplated to address different scenarios, including the implementation of disaster recovery and business continuity plans (BCDR). The following diagram is useful for guiding the possible choices in this area at a high level:

Figure 1 - Diagram to guide choices in the BCDR area

Disaster Recovery Strategies Considerations

First of all, it helps to align business requirements with RPO, RTO and with the availability of IT resources. An effective Disaster Recovery plan must be designed to achieve these goals by adopting the most appropriate technologies. About this, the adoption of native BCDR solutions for applications can be evaluated, for example SQL Always On availability group or SAP HANA System Replication (HSR), or non-native solutions such as VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) and Azure Site Recovery.

Azure VMware solution should be evaluated if, in enterprise environments, there are particularly stringent requirements in terms of RPO and RTO. Otherwise, you can use Azure Site Recovery or rely on system recovery using the Data Protection solution you are using.

Disaster Recovery Solutions using Azure VMware Solution

To implement disaster recovery plans using Azure VMware Solution, it is possible to adopt native VMware solutions or third-party solutions.

VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM)

VMware Site Recovery Manager is an automation solution, which integrates with underlying replication technology, able to offer:

Recovery test without service interruptions
Workflow able to carry out the orchestration of DR plans in an automated way
Automatic reset of network and security settings (integration with VMware NSX)

The solution offers the possibility to insure, in a simple and reliable way, restore and move virtual machines between multiple VMware sites with little or no downtime.

Site Recovery Manager requires one of the following replication technologies to orchestrate virtual machine recovery operations:

VMware vSphere Replication: replication focused on VMs and based on the hypervisor. It is the solution natively integrated with Site Recovery Manager and included in most versions of vSphere.
Third party solutions: Site Recovery Manager uses plug-in SRA (Storage Replication Adapter) developed by storage partners for integration with third-party systems.

Site Recovery Manager (SRM) for Azure VMware Solution (AVS) is able to automate and orchestrate failover and failback processes in the following Disaster Recovery scenarios:

On-premise VMware to Azure VMware Solution private cloud disaster recovery.
Primary Azure VMware Solution to a secondary disaster recovery Azure VMware Solution private cloud.

Furthermore, thanks to the possibility of carrying out failover tests, without generating interruptions on the production environment, it is possible to periodically guarantee the achievement of the objectives, related to the recovery time, required for disaster recovery plans. In this scenario SRM is licensed and supported directly by VMware.

For further details you can consult this Microsoft's document.

VMware HCX Disaster Recovery (DR)

Although the VMware HCX solution can be used with the Azure VMware Solution private cloud as a recovery target or destination, this possibility should only be considered in particular cases. In fact,, the adoption of this solution is not recommended for large environments, as the orchestration of activities during disaster recovery is totally manual. Currently the AVS solution does not have runbooks or features that can support failover operations during a disaster recovery. For enterprise DR scenarios it is therefore recommended to use the VMware Site Recovery Manager solution (SRM) or the third-party solutions described in the following paragraph. For more details about DR with VMware HCX you can consult this Microsoft's document.

Third party solutions

Microsoft, in order to guarantee its customers the opportunity to make the most of the investments made in skills and technologies, has partnered with some of the industry's leading partners to ensure integration and support. Among the main third-party solutions that can be used we find:

The adoption of some of these solutions, like JetStream, can also be advantageous in terms of cost, as Azure Blob Storage is used to keep copies of virtual machines and related data.

Figure 2 - DR operations with solutions such as JetStream

The data written by the virtual machines locally is replicated directly to an Azure Blob Storage and the resources of the DR infrastructure are not needed until a disaster occurs (or when a test is required) which prompts you to initiate the disaster recovery procedure. This approach implies that costs are minimized, with a consequent reduction in infrastructure costs compared to alternative DR solutions.

When an event occurs that involves the activation of the DR plan, the application and configuration data stored in the Blob Storage come quickly “rehydrated” in a vSphere cluster activated in AVS, allowing applications to resume operation in AVS.

Conclusions

When you need to develop a disaster recovery solution, each company has specific requirements to be respected and unique preferences on where to place workloads and how to manage the emergency plan. Azure VMware Solution (AVS) can be used flexibly according to different implementation models, easily integrating with both native VMware solutions and third-party solutions. This allows, to organizations at the enterprise level, to be able to rely on Azure VMware Solution for their DR scenarios, with the guarantee of obtaining effective protection and respecting corporate objectives in the Disaster Recovery field.

How to run VMware workloads natively on Azure

Businesses should adopt flexible and cutting-edge solutions to achieve greater stability, continuity and resilience of the main application workloads that support their core business. Azure VMware Solution (AVS) is the service designed, built and supported by Microsoft, and approved by VMware, which allows customers to easily extend or completely migrate their VMware applications residing on-premises to Azure. This article lists the key aspects of this solution that benefits from the efficiency of Microsoft's public cloud, while maintaining operational consistency with the VMware environment.

What is Azure VMware Solution (AVS)?

Azure VMware Solution (AVS) is a service that allows the provisioning and execution of an environment VMware Cloud Foundation full on Azure. VMware Cloud Foundation is VMware's hybrid cloud platform for managing virtual machines and orchestrating containers, where the entire stack is based on a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). This architecture model ensures consistent infrastructure and operation across any private and public cloud, including Microsoft Azure.

Figure 1 – Azure VMware Solution overview

The solution Azure VMware allows customers to adopt a full set of VMware features, with the guarantee of holding the validation "VMware Cloud Verified". This solution helps to achieve consistency, performance and interoperability for existing VMware workloads, without sacrificing speed, scalability and availability of Azure global infrastructure.

An Azure VMware Solution Private Cloud includes:

Dedicated bare-metal servers provided with ESXi VMware hypervisor
vCenter server for managing ESXi and vSAN
VMware NSX-T software defined networking for vSphere vMs
VMware vSAN datastore for vSphere vMs
VMware HCX for workload mobility management

Figure 2 – Azure VMware Solution Macro-Architecture

On these infrastructures, it will be possible to create, deploy or migrate VMware virtual machines, but with the advantage of also using the various services offered by Azure.

Main adoption scenarios

The Azure VMware solution can be adopted to address the following scenarios:

Need to expand your datacenter
Disaster recovery and business continuity
Application Modernization
Reduction, consolidation or decommissioning of your datacenter

Thanks to this solution it is possible to redistribute your VMware-based virtual machines in an automated way, scalable and highly available without changing the underlying vSphere hypervisor. Systems can be migrated by adopting native VMware solutions (VMware HCX) or using Azure Migrate.

Benefits of the solution

Among the main benefits of adopting this solution it is possible to mention:

Ability to take advantage of investments already made in the skills and tools for managing on-premises VMware environments.
Modernization of your application workloads by adopting Azure services and without facing interruptions.
Convenience especially for running Windows and SQL Server workloads. In fact,, customers who adopt this solution are entitled to three years of free extended security updates for Windows Server and SQL Server. Furthermore, being in effect an Azure service, Azure VMware Solution supports Azure Hybrid Benefits, that allow you to maximize the investments made in local Windows Server and SQL Server licenses during the migration or extension to Azure. Finally, you can get a financial benefit by buying Reserved Instances (to 1 or 3 years) to save on the cost of the Azure VMware Solution.

Features of the solution

Azure Private Cloud infrastructure contains vSphere clusters on dedicated bare metal systems, able to scale from 3 to 16 host. It also provides the ability to have multiple clusters in a single Azure Private Cloud. The hosts are high-end and equipped with two Intel processors 18 core, 2,3 GHz and 576 GB RAM.

Storage

Azure Private Clouds provide cluster-level storage using software-defined technology vMware vSAN. All local storage of each host in a cluster is used in a vSAN datastore and at-rest data encryption is enabled by default. The vSAN datastore also enables deduplication and data compression.

All disk groups use an NVMe cache of 1,6 TB with a raw capacity of 15,4 TB per host, based on SSD disks. The raw capacity of a cluster is the capacity per host multiplied by the number of nodes.

You can use Azure storage to extend the storage capacity of these private clouds. For more information about storage, see the Microsoft-specific documentation.

Networking

The solution offers a private cloud environment accessible from on-premises and Azure-based resources. Services like Azure ExpressRoute, VPN connections or Azure Virtual WAN are required to ensure connectivity.

In particular, ExpressRoute is used to connect physical components to the Azure backbone. Since Virtual Network Gateways connected to an ExpressRoute circuit cannot pass traffic between two circuits (one circuit will go to the on-premises environment and one will go to the Azure VMware solution) Microsoft uses the feature ExpressRoute Global Reach to directly connect the local circuit to AVS.

Figure 3 – Azure VMware Solution Networking

If ExpressRoute Global Reach cannot be activated, it is possible to evaluate the adoption of a routing solution using third-party appliances (NVA) or Azure Virtual WAN. In the scenario with NVA it becomes useful Azure Route Server, which simplifies dynamic routing between the virtual network appliance (NVA) and the Azure virtual network. Azure Route Server allows you to exchange routing information directly through the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) between any NVA (which supports this protocol) and the Azure virtual network, without the need to configure or maintain routing tables.

When you activate an Azure Private Cloud with Azure VMware Solution private networks are created for management, provisioning and vMotion functionality.

For further information on networking, see the Microsoft documentation and this document where more details are reported on possible scenarios to ensure connectivity.

Access and security

In order to achieve greater security, Azure VMware solution's private clouds use vSphere role-based access control. vSphere SSO LDAP features can be integrated with Azure Active Directory. For more information on this, see this Microsoft's document.

Management of updates and maintenance of the solution

One of the main advantages of this solution is that the platform is maintained by Microsoft and automatic and regular updates are included, providing the latest feature sets and increased security and stability.

The components of the Azure VMware solution that are subject to updates are as follows:

vCenter and ESXi
vSAN
NSX-T
Underlying hardware with bare metal node and network switch drivers and firmware

The following updates are applied to the Azure VMware solution:

Security patches and bug fixes released by VMware.
Major and minor version updates of VMware components.

In addition to performing updates, the Azure VMware solution also provides a backup of the configuration of the following VMware components:

vCenter Server
NSX-T Manager

More details about maintenance and platform updates can be found in this Microsoft article.

Support and Responsibility

Azure VMware Solution is validated, supported and certified by VMware and Microsoft. The support of the solution is provided by Microsoft which is always the first and only point of contact for the customer. If necessary, Microsoft will coordinate with VMware support for specific issues regarding VMware solutions.

Azure VMware Solution uses a shared responsibility model according to the following matrix:

Figure 4 – Azure VMware Solution: shared responsibility matrix

Solution security

Azure VMware Solution can count on a high degree of security consisting of the following factors:

Figure 5 – Factors that make up the security of Azure VMware Solution

Solution availability

The solution can be adopted in production environments and is currently available on several Azure regions, available at this link.

Solution monitor

The complete monitor of the solution can be done via Azure Monitor and, after the solution is activated in the Azure subscription, automatically starts collecting its logs. Furthermore, you can install the Azure Monitor agent on Linux and Windows virtual machines hosted in the private clouds of the Azure VMware solution, you can also enable the Azure diagnostics extension.

Conclusions

Thanks to the close collaboration between Microsoft and VMware, this solution offers customers who already have an on-premises VMware environment the same possibilities also in the Microsoft public cloud., being able to adopt the wide range of services offered by Azure. Furthermore, this solution allows you to take advantage of a consistent operating model that can increase agility, deployment speed and resiliency of your business critical workloads.

Azure VMware Solution: Disaster Recovery scenarios using VMware Site Recovery Manager

The corporate business is heavily dependent on IT solutions and often these are not properly structured to deal with incidents of any kind, even the most remote, which could cause damage, an interruption or loss of data. VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) is a disaster recovery solution that allows you to minimize the downtime of workloads in the VMware environment in the event of a disaster. SRM is very popular for customers who use VMware at on-premises datacenters and recently the possibility of using the same solution with Azure VMware Solution was announced (AVS). This article describes how SRM for AVS can simplify the management of Disaster Recovery strategies, ensuring rapid and predictable recovery times.

What is VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM)?

VMware Site Recovery Manager is an automation solution, which integrates with underlying replication technology, able to offer:

Recovery test without service interruptions
Workflow able to guarantee the orchestration of DR plans in an automated way
Automatic reset of network and security settings (integration with VMware NSX)

The solution offers the possibility to insure in a simple and reliable way, restore and move virtual machines between multiple VMware sites with little or no downtime.

Site Recovery Manager allows you to natively take advantage of VMware vSphere and use the SDDC architecture (Software-Defined Data Center) integrating with other VMware solutions, such as VMware NSX (network virtualization) and VMware vSAN.

Site Recovery Manager requires one of the following underlying replication technologies to orchestrate virtual machine recovery operations:

VMware vSphere Replication: replication focused on VMs and based on the hypervisor. It is the solution natively integrated with Site Recovery Manager and included in most versions of vSphere.
Third party solutions: Site Recovery Manager uses plug-in SRA (Storage Replication Adapter) developed by storage partners for integration with third-party systems.

How to purchase SRM

Site Recovery Manager is available in two versions: Standard ed Enterpirse. Both versions of Site Recovery Manager are licensed “per protected virtual machine”.

SRM STANDARD

SRM ENTERPRISE

Licenses

As far as 75 Protected VMs per site

No license limit on the number of protected VMs

Exclusive features

– Integration with VMware NSX

– VMotion orchestrated movement between multiple vCenter instances

– Extended storage support

– Policy-based storage management

What is Azure VMware Solution (AVS)?

Azure VMware Solution (AVS) is a service that allows the provisioning and execution of an environmentVMware Cloud Foundationfull in Azure.VMware Cloud Foundation is VMware's hybrid cloud platform for managing virtual machines and orchestrating containers, where the entire stack is based on a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). This architecture model ensures consistent infrastructure and operation across any private and public cloud, including Microsoft Azure.

Figure 1 – Azure VMware Solution overview

The solutionAVS allows customers to adopt a full set of VMware features, with the guarantee of holding the validation "VMware Cloud Verified". At the same time the platform is maintained by Microsoft and automatic and regular updates are guaranteed, that allow you to take advantage of the latest feature sets, as well as obtaining high security and stability.

Thanks to this solution it is therefore possible to have consistency, performance and interoperability for existing VMware workloads, without sacrificing speed, the scalability and availability of the global Azure infrastructure.

An Azure VMware Solution Private Cloud includes:

vCenter server for managing ESXi and vSAN
Dedicated bare-metal servers provided with ESXi VMware hypervisor
VMware vSAN datastore for vSphere vMs
VMware NSX-T software defined networking for vSphere vMs
VMware HCX for workload mobility management

Figure 2 - Azure VMware Solution interconnection with the on-premises and Azure environment

VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) with Azure VMware Solution (AVS)

Site Recovery Manager (SRM) for Azure VMware Solution (AVS) is able to automate and orchestrate failover and failback processes in the following Disaster Recovery scenarios:

On-premise VMware to Azure VMware Solution private cloud disaster recovery
Primary Azure VMware Solution to a secondary disaster recovery Azure VMware Solution private cloud

Furthermore, thanks to the ability to perform failover tests without generating disruption to the production environment, it is possible to periodically guarantee the achievement of the recovery time objectives required for the disaster recovery plans.

Figure 3 - Diagram of a DR scenario between two Azure VMware Solution environments

Also in this scenario SRM is licensed and supported directly by VMware. Customers cannot reuse SRM licenses from the on-premises environment even in AVS environments, but new SRM licenses must be available for AVS environments.

Azure VMware Solution also provides a mechanism to simplify the installation and management of the SRM life cycle. In fact,, by accessing the navigation menu in the AVS private cloud it is possible to install VMware SRM with vSphere Replication as an additional service. To do this, simply select “VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) - vSphere Replication ”from the Disaster Recovery Solution menu and follow the relevant instructions.

Figure 4 - Enabling of “VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) – vSphere Replication” from Disaster Recovery Solution menu of AVS

Use cases

This integration between Azure VMware Solution and Site Recovery Manager can be activated to implement the following types of recovery scenarios:

Planned migration. This is an orderly migration of virtual machines from the protected site to the recovery site where no data loss is expected during the guided migration of workloads.
Disaster Recovery. SRM activates the DR plan when the primary site unexpectedly goes offline. Site Recovery Manager orchestrates the recovery process with replication mechanisms, to minimize data loss and environment downtime.
Bidirectional protection. Bi-directional protection uses a single set of paired SRM sites to protect virtual machines in both directions. Each site can be a protected site and a recovery site at the same time, but for a different set of virtual machines.

Conclusions

Thanks to the introduction of this feature in AVS, starting from the automation functionality of VMware Site Recovery Manager recovery plans and the hypervisor-based replication capabilities of vSphere Replication, you can take advantage of an end-to-end Disaster Recovery solution, able to accelerate the enabling of the protection, as well as simplifying the operations necessary to implement DR plans. In this way, you can make the most of the agility and convenience of this solution in an Azure environment.