Microsoft and Broadcom to support license portability for VMware Cloud Foundation on Azure VMware Solution

Microsoft and Broadcom have partnered closely for many years to support our mutual customers, and we continue to build and innovate together as customer needs change. Today, we are pleased to share that Microsoft and Broadcom are expanding our partnership with plans to support VMware Cloud Foundation subscriptions on Azure VMware Solution. Customers that own or purchase licenses for VMware Cloud Foundation will be able to use those licenses on Azure VMware Solution, as well as their own datacenters, giving them flexibility to meet changing business needs.

This provides an additional purchase option for Azure VMware Solution, which has been sold and operated by Microsoft since 2019. Customers can currently purchase the solution with VMware licenses included, and this option will continue to be available for customers that prefer to purchase their VMware licenses as part of their solution from Microsoft.

Azure VMware Solution delivers a fully managed VMware environment that is operated and supported by Microsoft. Customers can move VMware workloads to Azure “as is” with minimal to no refactoring. This streamlines migration and allows customers to continue using familiar skills while learning new Azure skills.  

By migrating to Azure VMware Solution, now available in 33 regions around the world, organizations can take advantage of Azure’s scalable and high-performance cloud infrastructure. Customers can deploy with business-critical capabilities such as backup, high availability, threat protection, and performance monitoring. Moreover, workloads running on Azure VMware Solution can be integrated with Azure’s portfolio of more than 200 cloud services to accelerate innovation, gain deeper insights from data with advanced AI services, and to modernize business applications. 

VMware Cloud Foundation delivers a private cloud platform that is ubiquitous, flexible, and integrated across cloud endpoints. By deploying VMware Cloud Foundation ​on​​ ​Azure, customers benefit from a highly optimized cloud operating model that provides the scale and agility of public cloud with the security and performance of private cloud. Running VMware Cloud Foundation ​on ​Azure enables organizations to modernize IT infrastructure with demonstrable TCO, provide developers a self-service private cloud experience resulting in greater productivity, and achieve better cyber resiliency and security.

With​​​​​​ improved license portability for customers with eligible VMware Cloud Foundation entitlements, customers will be able to purchase subscriptions of the new VMware Cloud Foundation software and have complete mobility to and from their on-premises environment to Azure VMware Solution. VMware customers that have already purchased and begun deploying the new VMware Cloud Foundation will be able to transfer the remaining value of an existing subscription to Azure VMware Solution. Additionally, customers will be able to move their VMware Cloud Foundation subscription between on-premises and Azure VMware Solution as their needs and requirements evolve over time. ​​​​​​Customers will retain the rights to their software subscription when moving their VMware Cloud Foundation subscription to Azure VMware Solution. 

VMware Rapid Migration Plan: Reduce your migration time and cost

In addition to the new VMware license portability benefit, the VMware Rapid Migration Plan provides an additional and comprehensive set of licensing benefits and programs to reduce the cost and time it takes for organizations to migrate to Azure VMware Solution.  

The plan includes:

• Price protection: With reserved instances customers can lock in pricing for one, three, or five years.  
• Savings for Windows Server and SQL Server: Windows Server and SQL Server are common workloads on VMware environments. With Software Assurance for on-premises Windows Server and SQL Server licenses, organizations can qualify for the Azure Hybrid Benefit discount to use existing Windows Server and SQL Server licenses in Azure VMware Solution. Free Extended Security Updates are available for older versions that face end of support.
• Migration support: Use Azure Migrate and Modernize to get resources, expert help, and funding from Microsoft and its partner ecosystem. 
• Azure credits: Customers that purchase a new reserved instance for Azure VMware Solution can get additional Azure credits valid for Azure VMware Solution or other Azure services. 

Supporting your cloud journey with Microsoft and Broadcom

We are committed to continued partnership and innovation to support our mutual customers as they adapt to changing business needs. VMware Cloud Foundation license portability to Azure VMware Solution will be available later this year, so now is a great time to contact your account team or Microsoft partner to start planning your move.

Source: microsoft.com

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Get ready for AI at the Migrate to Innovate digital event

Organizations of all sizes are recognizing that using AI fuels the kind of innovation that’s needed to maintain a competitive edge. What’s often less clear is how to prepare your organization to be able to take full advantage of AI. For organizations running business-critical workloads on Windows Servers and SQL Server, how do you get from running in a traditional, on-premises environment to operating in an environment that supports AI and other modern technologies?

Get ready for AI

To get a solid understanding of how to navigate this type of move, join us at the free digital event Migrate to Innovate: Be AI Ready, Be Secure on Tuesday, April 16, 2024, at 9:00 AM–11:00 AM Pacific Time. Register now to attend information-packed sessions that will help you understand the challenges organizations face in preparing for AI and cloud-native technologies, and what you need to have in place to solve those challenges.

Address your most pressing business challenges

One of the biggest obstacles in the path to modernization is balancing the need to embrace the latest advancements with the need to meet current business challenges. Whether it’s managing rising costs, safeguarding against security threats, maintaining compliance, or controlling IT sprawl as business expands, there are a lot of different priorities competing for your focus, time, and resources.

At the Migrate to Innovate digital event, you’ll learn how Azure provides an optimized platform to fully embrace AI while addressing your most pressing business priorities by maximizing ROI, performance, and resilience. Sessions will focus on how to optimize migration of your Windows Server and SQL Server workloads to Azure to position your organization for innovation, efficiency, growth, and long-term success.

Be the first to see product updates, deep dives, and demos

Attend the Migrate to Innovate digital event to get first access to seeing what’s included in the upcoming Windows Server 2025 release. View product demos of the newest AI innovations, including Microsoft Copilot. Join product experts for deep-dive product sessions covering Windows Server, SQL Server, AI, security, and a range of modernization-related capabilities. Learn about the latest updates on intelligent Azure databases to power your data and AI workloads, and discover strategies for gaining cloud agility, including running VMware workloads across cloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments.

Session highlights include:

• Keynote address—Understand current business challenges and learn how migrating to Azure provides the agility that’s needed to address them. Hear about the latest product announcements and advancements that will help you get ready to take advantage of AI.
• Migrate to Azure to be AI Ready—Learn the steps that organizations need to take to be ready for AI. Watch demos showing how customers are using AI solutions—including Microsoft Copilot in Azure—to solve complex problems, and how migration accelerates innovation with AI.
• Customer interview—Hear customers discuss why they chose to make the move to Azure, and how migration has provided them with the business outcomes they need for success, including AI-readiness, security, cost savings, and performance.
• Migrate your Windows Server to Azure—Learn how Azure is optimized to help you migrate and modernize your Windows Server workloads. Discover on-premises, hybrid, and cloud scenarios for VMware. Watch a demo on Windows Server 2025 and its support for AI capabilities as well as hybrid and edge scenarios.
• Migrate your Data to Azure—In the era of AI, learn how to power mission-critical applications with Azure databases. See how to simplify migration with the help of Azure Arc migration assessments.
• New risks, New rules: Secure Code-to-Cloud Migration—Find out how Azure helps you secure your entire migration journey using a cloud-native application platform (CNAPP), Microsoft Defender for Cloud, and Microsoft Copilot for Security.
• Get cloud agility anywhere: Strategies for VMware workloads—Understand the issues that on-premises VMware users face, and learn how taking an adaptive cloud approach with Azure helps address these challenges.  
• Optimize your migration with key guidance, offerings, and tools—Learn about the three most important optimization activities, and discover resources, guidance, and tools that will help you plan and implement your migration solution.

Discover the business outcomes of migrating to Azure

Register for the event to understand how to get your organization on the path to modernization and hear about the business outcomes that customers are seeing when they migrate Windows Server and SQL Server workload to Azure, including:

• AI readiness: Organizations get results with an AI-ready foundation on Azure. In a study of customers using Azure AI services, a composite organization based on the experiences of six interviewees achieved a three-year ROI of 284%. Work output and operational efficiency increased, employee collaboration and safety improved, and organizations reported faster and more data-driven decision-making.
• Code-to-cloud security: With Azure, you get a complete code-to-cloud security platform. From foundational security to cloud-native workload protection, replacing multiple third-party security tools with comprehensive, multilayered security reduces risk and costs.
• Maximizing ROI and performance: Workloads run faster and at a lower cost on Azure than with other cloud providers. AWS is up to 5 times more expensive than Azure for Windows Server and SQL Server—and SQL Server runs up to 5.5 times faster on Azure than on AWS.
• Cloud agility anywhere: Azure meets organizations where they are in their migration journey through an adaptive cloud approach. Azure provides the tools and support to help you secure and govern your entire digital estate across hybrid, multicloud, and edge environments on your own terms.

Source: microsoft.com

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Azure Elastic SAN efficiently migrates SAN to the cloud—now generally available

We are excited to announce the general availability (GA) of Azure Elastic SAN, the industry’s first fully-managed and cloud-native storage area network (SAN) offering that simplifies deploying, scaling, managing, and configuring a SAN in the cloud. Azure Elastic SAN responds to the vital need for seamless migration of extensive SAN environments to the cloud, bringing a new level of efficiency and ease. This enterprise-class offering stands out by adopting a SAN-like resource hierarchy, provisioning resources at the appliance level, and dynamically distributing these resources to meet the demands of diverse workloads across databases, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDIs), and business applications. Beyond that, it delivers cloud native benefits with scale on demand, policy-based service management, and cloud native security enforcements across encryption and network access. It’s a thoughtful innovation combining the efficiency at scale of on-premises SAN systems and the flexibility of cloud storage.

Since initially announcing the preview of Elastic SAN, we have added a robust suite of features to truly make this an enterprise class solution:

• Get even more out of your Elastic SAN performance with multi-session connectivity and increased performance and scale up to 80,000 IOPS and 1,280 MBps on single volume, even higher on the entire SAN.
• Easily migrate a clustered application (like SQL Failover Cluster Instances) to Elastic SAN volumes with shared volume support.
• Control which applications can consume your data, and which clients can access your volumes with Server-Side Encryption with Customer Managed Keys and private endpoint support.
• Confidently run even your most critical workloads with the addition of snapshot support.

The Elastic SAN GA release will be available in more regions, while adding a few new features as well:

• Investigate performance and capacity metrics with Azure Monitor Metrics.
• Prevent incidents due to misconfigurations with the help of Azure Policy.

This release also marks the removal of the sign-up process for the snapshot export feature, making it publicly available.

When to use Azure Elastic SAN

Get the most out of throughput and IOPS intensive workloads—Elastic SAN allows you to drive higher storage throughput over compute network bandwidth with the iSCSI protocol. This helps you optimize various database workloads, like SQL Servers. SQL Server deployments on Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) occasionally require overprovisioning a VM to reach the target VM-level disk throughput. You can avoid this with Elastic SAN, as noticed by one of our preview customers, de Goudse verzekeringen:

“Our SQL Server data warehouse workloads required a solution that could eliminate input/output (IO) bottlenecks on both the VM and managed data disks. The Azure Elastic SAN solution provides this benefit by removing the VM bandwidth bottleneck and enabling higher IO throughput. The Elastic SAN performance allowed us to reduce the VM size and implement constrained cores to save substantial costs on SQL server core licensing.”

—Peter van Noort, Cloud Engineer, de Goudse verzekeringen and

Michiel Kuip, SQL Server DBA, de Goudse verzekeringen.

Migrate your on-premises SAN to the Cloud—Not only does Elastic SAN use a familiar resource hierarchy to on-premises SANs; it also allows provisioning of input/output operations per second (IOPS) and throughput at the Elastic SAN resource level, dynamically sharing the provisioned performance across your workloads, and managing security policies at the workload level as you would on SAN appliances. This makes migrating from on-premises SANs to the cloud a lot more straight-forward than trying to right-size hundreds or thousands of individual disks to serve the many workloads running on your SAN(s).

To further simplify the migration process, you can plan and execute your data migration using the Azure-Sponsored migration tool by Cirrus Data Solutions, which you can find in the Azure Marketplace. Cirrus Migrate Cloud now makes it even easier to migrate and save with their cost optimization wizard:

“We are excited for the launch of Azure Elastic SAN and see a real opportunity for companies to lower their storage total cost of ownership (TCO). Over the last 18 months, we have worked closely with the Azure team to develop enhanced functionality in Cirrus Migrate Cloud that enables enterprises to move their live workloads to Azure Elastic SAN with just a click. Offering Cirrus Migrate Cloud to not only accelerate Elastic SAN adoption, but to analyze the enterprise’s storage performance and accurately recommend the best Azure storage is an exciting expansion of our partnership with Microsoft and extends our vision of real-time block data mobility to Azure and Elastic SAN,”

—Wayne Lam, Chairman and CEO, Cirrus Data Solutions.

We have partnered with Cirrus Data Solutions to ensure their recommendations cover all Azure Block Storage offerings (Disks and Elastic SAN) and accounts for your specific storage needs. For example, if you are looking to run single queue depth workloads that are extremely latency sensitive (such as an online transaction processing (OLTP)-type workload), the wizard will recommend Ultra Disk—with the lowest sub-ms latency on Azure.

Consolidate storage and achieve cost efficiency at scale—Since Elastic SAN lets you dynamically share the provisioned performance across volumes, you can easily achieve high performance at an efficient rate. With a shared performance pool to handle IO spikes, you can avoid overprovisioning just to handle the peak traffic levels of your individual workloads. Similarly, because Elastic SAN allows scaling of capacity independently from performance, you can right-size to efficiently meet your storage requirements. For example, if your workloads’ performance requirements are met but you need more storage capacity, you can purchase just that—at a 25% lower cost than if you had to add more performance as well.

Get the lowest per GiB storage cost for Azure VMware Solution—With this recently announced preview integration, you can expand your Azure VMware Solution (AVS) storage capacity without having to add more vSAN storage nodes, by exposing an Elastic SAN volume as an external datastore to your AVS cluster. With Elastic SAN, you can provision additional storage in 1 TiB increments for as little as 6 to 8 cents per GiB per month, the lowest per GiB cost available for AVS storage. As a first party service, it provides a native Azure Storage experience, so you can deploy and connect an Elastic SAN datastore through the Azure Portal in a matter of minutes.

Utilize fast attach and detach for Azure Container Storage—Azure Container Storage is the industry’s first platform-managed container native storage service in the public cloud providing highly scalable, cost-effective persistent volumes, built natively for containers. You can use Elastic SAN as the backing storage for Azure Container Storage, and benefit from the fast attach and detach made possible by the iSCSI protocol. Using Elastic SAN also lets you take advantage of the dynamic resource sharing it offers to lower your storage costs—and because your data will persist on the volumes, you could even spin down your cluster for further savings. This makes it a great choice as storage for containerized applications running general purpose database workloads, streaming and messaging services, or continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) environments.

Price and performance of Azure Elastic SAN

Elastic SAN is a good fit for most throughput and IOPS intensive workloads, like various databases. We recently raised several performance limits to be able to serve even more demanding use cases:

An example of a database solution where we have seen great results during our Preview is SQL Servers. SQL Server deployments on Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) occasionally require overprovisioning a VM to reach the target VM-level disk throughput. You can avoid this with Elastic SAN, since you can drive higher storage throughput over compute network bandwidth with the iSCSI protocol.

Combined with the benefit you can get from dynamic performance sharing, you can save significantly on your monthly bill. For example, another customer during preview was writing data to multiple different databases. In the simplified graphic below, you can see these databases require a total of 100,000 IOPS for peak performance if you provision for the max IOPS required per database. However, from what we observe in real life scenarios not all database instances will spike at the same time where some are more active during business hours for inquiries, and others off business hours for reporting. If you measure the peak IOPS aggregated across these workloads, it was only 50,000 at any given time. Since Elastic SAN allows its volumes to share the total performance provisioned at the SAN level, it lets you account for the combined maximum performance required by your workloads, rather than the sum of the individual requirements—which frequently means you can provision (and pay for) less performance to serve your needs. In the example provided, you would provision 50% less IOPS at 50,000 IOPS than if you were to cater to the individual workloads, significantly lowering your costs.

Source: microsoft.com

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