I’m writing to you today from VMware Explore in Barcelona, where my team and I are presenting to and meeting with customers and partners in person! When we launched Azure VMware Solution two years ago amid a pandemic, IT agility became a top priority as organizations scrambled to enable remote work and ensure business resilience via cloud solutions. In today’s economic climate most organizations want to do more with less. They recognize that by running workloads in the cloud, they can respond more rapidly and reduce IT infrastructure costs.

"I can definitely say that Azure—and in particular Azure VMware Solution—is the right solution for us. It allows us to seamlessly move from on-premises to the cloud, thereby freeing up resources and capital investments that can be used where they are needed more.”—Giorgio Veronesi, Sr. Vice President of ICT Infrastructure, Snam.

Given that TCO is top priority for most companies in the current economic climate, migrating your VMware workloads to Azure is a great way to reduce the cost of maintaining an on-premises VMware environment. Because every customer starts their cloud journey at a different place, we help enable customers to migrate to the cloud on their terms and maintain support for the business platforms and investments they have today.  Azure VMware Solution is an easy way to extend and migrate existing VMware Private Clouds to run them natively on Azure. Azure VMware Solution offers symmetry with on-premises environments, which helps to accelerate datacenter migrations, so customers recognize the benefits of the cloud sooner.

"With help from Microsoft and Mobiz, we were able to deliver a fully qualified landing zone in Azure in one-third the time and at one-third the budget compared to previous cloud efforts."—Sam Chenaur: Vice President and Global Head of Infrastructure, Sanofi.

In keeping with the goal of doing more with less, Microsoft’s unique Azure Hybrid Benefit and Extended Security Updates for Windows Server and SQL Server, Azure VMware Solution is one of the fastest and most cost-effective ways to seamlessly migrate and run VMware in the cloud. If you want to learn more about TCO in your organization read this Forrester paper.

Check out what’s new in Azure VMware Solution

I am excited to share some of the recent updates we’ve made to Azure VMware Solution.

• Stretched Clusters for Azure VMware Solution, now in preview, provides 99.99 percent uptime for mission critical applications that require the highest availability. In times of availability zone failure, your virtual machines (VMs) and applications automatically failover to an unaffected availability zone with no application impact. Learn more.
• Azure NetApp Files Datastores is now generally available to run your storage intensive workloads on Azure VMware Solution. This integration between Azure VMware Solution and Azure NetApp Files enables you to create datastores via the Azure VMware Solution resource provider with Azure NetApp Files NFS volumes and attach the datastores to your private cloud clusters of choice. Learn more.
• Customer-managed keys for Azure VMware Solution is now in preview, both supporting higher security for customers’ mission-critical workloads and providing you with control over your encrypted vSAN data on Azure VMware Solution. With this feature, you can use Azure Key Vault to generate customer-managed keys as well as centralize and streamline the key management process. Learn more.
• New node sizing for Azure VMware Solution. Start leveraging Azure VMware Solution across two new node sizes with the general availability of AV36P and AV52 in AVS. With these new node sizes organizations can optimize their workloads for memory and storage with AV36P and AV52. Learn more.
• Microsoft Azure native services let you monitor, manage, and protect your virtual machines (VMs) in a hybrid environment (Azure, Azure VMware Solution, and on-premises). Here are some of the existing Azure services: Azure Arc, Azure Monitor, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Azure Update Management, and Log Analytics Workspace. Learn more.

If you would like to stay up to date with the latest releases from Azure VMware Solution, please follow  Azure updates.

Learn more

This week we are offering a special opportunity to take the Azure VMware Solution Cloud Skills Challenge. Compete in this free, self-paced, Microsoft learning path and advance your technical skills at the same time! Register for the Challenge.

And if you are here at VMware Explore Barcelona, stop by the Microsoft booth, and say hello. We are excited to see you in person!

Check out all our Azure Breakout Sessions during the event.
Visit Booth #401 for our hourly in-booth theater sessions.

You can also attend our next Azure Webinar on December 15th: How to Modernize Your VMware Environment with Microsoft Azure.

As always, you can visit the Azure VMware Solution website or documentation for more information.