Microsoft Courts VMware Workloads
Microsoft is making a clear play for VMware customers with a new, detailed Learn Plan for migrating workloads to Azure VMware Solution. The plan emphasizes using Azure Arc for unified hybrid management, signaling a continued push to position Azure as the go-to platform for hybrid cloud.
Broadcom's acquisition of VMware, which closed in November 2023, triggered an abrupt overhaul of VMware's product and licensing strategy. The company immediately ended the sale of perpetual licenses, shifting all customers to a subscription-only model and consolidating hundreds of products into bundled offerings like VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). This strategic shift has been met with significant customer frustration over steep price increases, with some organizations reporting hikes of three to six times their previous costs. The move to mandatory product bundles and changes in technical support have led many to actively seek vendor alternatives. Azure VMware Solution (AVS) is a first-party service jointly engineered by Microsoft and VMware that runs the native VMware Cloud Foundation stack on dedicated Azure bare-metal infrastructure. This allows for a "lift and shift" migration of vSphere workloads to the public cloud without needing to refactor applications, enabling the use of existing VMware skills and tools. The integration with Azure Arc is central to Microsoft's strategy, providing a single control plane to manage and govern resources across on-premises vSphere environments, AVS, and native Azure services. This allows administrators to perform VM operations, apply security policies, and manage updates from the Azure portal consistently across their entire hybrid estate.
