Azure VMware Solution: A Year in Review
Author: @Liam Sosinsky, Senior Product Marketing Manager
Azure VMware Solution, a service that empowers you to utilize the VMware technology stack and team expertise in Azure, has made significant strides since its inception three years ago. Our commitment to global support is evident in our geographic expansion across 30 Azure regions, surpassing all other cloud providers. Our focus remains on enhancing this service and making impactful improvements to the product that align with our customers’ objectives of running VMware workloads efficiently and modernizing their applications.
As we bid farewell to 2023, we want to express our appreciation to our customers and partners. Their unwavering support and insightful feedback have been instrumental in refining our product and implementing meaningful enhancements throughout the year.
In this blog post, we highlight some of the key updates and features introduced this year, as well as some recent success stories of customers who have migrated to Azure:
Key Updates in 2023
Azure Elastic SAN (preview): Azure Elastic SAN is a cloud-native managed SAN offering scalability, cost-efficiency, high performance, and security. It now supports snapshots, enhanced security, and integrates with Azure VMware Solution. Furthermore, as a VMware Certified datastore, Elastic SAN allows you to independently scale your storage and performance, optimizing your total cost of ownership and scalability.
Stretched Clusters: Enhancing application availability, our Stretched Clusters ensure 99.99 percent uptime for mission-critical applications. They facilitate the deployment of Azure VMware Solution private clouds across two availability zones within an Azure region, ensuring business continuity and disaster recovery in the event of a zone failure.
AV64 SKU: With the introduction of the AV64 SKU, customers can now access a new node size for Azure VMware Solution in specific regions. The AV64 node is built on Intel Xeon Platinum 8370C CPUs with a total of 64 physical cores, 1 TB of memory and 15.4 TB of total storage. The AV64 SKU can be used for extending existing Azure VMware Solution private clouds built on AV36, AV36P, or AV52 node sizes, or for creating new private clouds with higher compute and storage capacity.
Azure VMware Solution in Microsoft Azure Government: Meeting strict data location and security requirements, Azure VMware Solution has been approved to be added as a service within the Azure Government Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) High Provisional Authorization to Operate (P-ATO). This allows customers and partners requiring data sovereignty to meet FedRAMP requirements.
VMware Cloud Director service for enterprise: Now available for enterprise, our VMware Cloud Director service offers a multi-cloud control plane for managing multi-tenancy across various infrastructures. This service enables customers to provision and manage Azure VMware Solution private clouds and offer self-service capabilities to their end users.
Customer-managed keys: Enhancing security for mission-critical workloads, our customer-managed keys for Azure VMware Solution allow customers to use their own encryption keys, stored in Azure Key Vault, to encrypt and decrypt their data at rest.
Azure NetApp Files for Azure Government: The features of Azure NetApp Files (ANF) available on Azure public cloud are now supported in Azure Government regions. This enables U.S. government and public sector customers to create Network File System (NFS) datastores with ANF volumes and attach them to Azure VMware Solution (AVS) clusters. This allows these customers to expand their storage instead of scaling the clusters, which can lead to cost savings and improved performance.
Customer Success Stories with Azure VMware Solution
Home Trust Company: This Canadian financial services institution reaped significant benefits from migrating to Azure VMware Solution. The transition allowed them to leave behind their costly and resource-intensive cloud-hosted solution running VMware. They now enjoy improved performance, seamless scalability, cost savings, and ease of management with Microsoft handling necessary VMware updates and patches. The migration, involving more than 750 virtual machines, was completed in less than half a year, reducing operating costs, increasing reliability and resilience, and enabling faster product launches. Learn more
Netstar: Despite the potential complexities of cloud migration, Netstar successfully transitioned to Azure VMware Solution with zero downtime during their busiest month, December. This move not only offloaded risks associated with aging hardware but also resulted in financial savings. The cost of the move was only 25% of a hardware refresh, significantly reducing their total cost of ownership and eliminating additional expenses associated with on-premises solutions. Learn more
NeighborWorks America: Navigating the challenges of cloud migration, NeighborWorks America accomplished a swift transition to Azure VMware Solution in under three months. They worked with Microsoft experts to make data backups automatic, and the nonprofit’s apps now run in Azure. The move to the cloud saved NeighborWorks $300,000 in expenditure in less than a year, and the pay-for-what-you-use cloud service ensures the nonprofit does not spend more than it needs to. Learn more
What’s next?
We are proud of what we have achieved with Azure VMware Solution in 2023, but we are not stopping here. Stay on top of what’s new and check out The Ultimate Guide to VMware Migration and Modernization on Azure e-book to learn how to future-proof and protect your VMware workloads by migrating them to Azure.
Author
Liam Sosinsky a Senior Product Marketing Manager for Azure VMware Solution at Microsoft.
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