Have you been considering a move to the public cloud? Many organisations can find the move daunting, even when it’s the right one to make. Azure Service Architect Damien Reffin explores the imperative to move your VMware environment into Azure and how AVS can make it fast and painless.
What are the challenges of moving to the public cloud?
For many organisations, the migration of on-premises VMware workloads to the cloud has been made possible by the advancements in cloud computing and application development. Yet, migrating existing workloads to the cloud swiftly and without disruption, remains a challenge for some.
The hurdles organisations face when developing a cloud adoption strategy vary. They include skills gaps, existing data centre investments, governance, hybrid cloud management security, and concerns around uncontrolled costs.
This leaves organisations at a crossroads when it comes to their cloud transformation. You might be under pressure from end users demanding the high availability and performance of cloud-based apps. You could be facing increasing infrastructure capacity demands or even the end-of-support on software and hardware investments.
Despite recognising these challenges, organisations are still finding it difficult to rearchitect their VMware workloads. Critical events impacting transformation timelines, limited IT team capacity, potential for business disruption and the perceived impact on the amount that will be required – all of these barriers can seem insurmountable.
Five reasons why you should migrate with Azure VMware Solution
The good news is that help is at hand. AVS is Microsoft’s solution to seamlessly moving your VMware workloads from your datacentre to Azure. It enables you to integrate additional Azure services more easily while continuing to manage your environment with your existing VMware skills and familiar tools.
Depending on your motivations, there are many reasons why migrating using AVS puts you on the most optimal route to the cloud. Here are just five reasons why you should migrate with AVS:
- Run your workloads without the need to rearchitect applications by continuing to use the ESXi hypervisor and first-party tools on the highly available Azure public cloud.
- Reduce, retire, or consolidate your private cloud footprint, while taking advantage of massive on-demand cloud capacity.
- Cost-effectively run your VMware apps on Windows Server and SQL Server with Azure Hybrid Usage Benefit and extended software updates.
- Flexibly extend your datacentre for development and testing or easily integrate your current applications with modern Azure services.
- Simplify your cloud journey with a rapid lift and shift of resources while preserving your existing IP addressing scheme and operating model.
What is AVS?
AVS, or Azure VMware Solution, is a hybrid cloud service that makes it easy to migrate fully functioning VMware software-defined data centres (SDDC) to the Microsoft Azure public cloud. It’s built on VMware Cloud Foundation, a comprehensive offering of software-defined compute, storage, networking, and management.
With AVS, organisations can manage and secure applications using existing VMware tools while leveraging all the benefits of the global Microsoft Azure infrastructure. It offers a fast-track path to the cloud by running VMWare workloads natively as an Azure service.
You can migrate or extend VMWare workloads from on-premises environments to Azure without having to worry about the cost, effort or risk of re-architecting applications or retooling operations.
Benefits of using AVS for your VMware to Azure migration
Digital transformation can be a costly, complex and disruptive process for many organisations – but AVS allows you to reap the benefits of the cloud quickly, skipping what could be an uncertain and potentially protracted cloud transformation.
Take a look at the commercial, technical and sustainability benefits of using AVS.
Leverage cloud cost savings
Since AVS allows you to use all existing VMWare tooling, you can avoid unnecessary spend on new talent to manage your cloud skills gap. Additionally, AVS allows you to reduce infrastructure maintenance effort and total cost of ownership (TCO) in the datacentre.
Keep your existing VMware tooling
One of the key technical benefits of AVS is the ability to continue using the same VMware systems you are familiar with even when your environment is in the Azure cloud. It’s also very easy to scale and manage your environment, and you can leverage the Azure ecosystem for secure workloads and monitoring.
Reach sustainability goals
Just by using Azure, you are benefiting from all of Microsoft’s sustainability initiatives. It powers innovation at scale delivering up to 98% more carbon efficient cloud computing when compared to on-premises environments. Additionally, Microsoft provides access to sustainability tools such as the Emissions Impact Dashboard (EID) to track carbon emissions.
Get AVS support from an Azure Expert Managed Service Provider
Our status as an Azure Expert Managed Service Provider (MSP) provides us with access to exclusive benefits from Microsoft – not to mention that we are one of just 25 global partners supporting Microsoft and VMware’s joint initiative to make it easy for organisations to move to the public cloud.
By partnering with us, you can accelerate your journey into the cloud at your own pace. Beyond your VMware to Azure migration, as the UK’s leading Microsoft Azure Partner, we can help you modernise with access to exclusive programmes and cost benefits, supported by our world-class Azure experts.
