Microsoft announces next evolution of Azure VMware Solution

With the current economic environment, many organizations face new challenges to find rapid and cost-effective solutions that enable business stability, continuity, and resiliency. The new Azure VMware Solution empowers customers to seamlessly extend or completely migrate their existing on-premises VMware applications to Azure without the cost, effort, or risk of re-architecting applications or retooling operations. This helps our customers gain cloud efficiency and enables them to innovate at their own pace with Azure services across security, data, and artificial intelligence, as well as unified management capabilities. Customers can also save money with Windows Server and SQL Server workloads running on Azure VMware by taking advantage of Azure Hybrid Benefits.

Microsoft first party service

The new Azure VMware Solution is a first party service from Microsoft. By launching a new service that is directly owned, operated, and supported by Microsoft, we can ensure greater quality, reliability, and direct access to Azure innovation for our customers while providing you with a single point of contact for all your needs. With today’s announcement and our continued collaboration with VMware, the new Azure VMware Solution lays the foundation for our customers’ success in the future.

Sanjay Poonen, Chief Operating Officer at VMware commented, “VMware and Microsoft have a long-standing partnership and a shared heritage in supporting our customers. Now more than ever it is important we come together and help them create stability and efficiency for their businesses. The new Azure VMware Solution gives customers the ability to use the same VMware foundation in Azure as they use in their private data centers. It provides a consistent operating model that can increase business agility and resiliency, reduces costs, and enable a native developer experience for all types of applications.”

These comments were echoed by Jason Zander, Executive Vice President at Microsoft, who said, “This is an amazing milestone for Microsoft and VMware to meet our customers where they are today on their cloud journey. Azure VMware Solution is a great example of how we design Azure services to support a broad range of customer workloads. Through close collaboration with the VMware team, I’m excited that customers running VMware on-premises will be able to benefit from Azure’s highly reliable infrastructure sooner.”

The new solution is built on Azure, delivering the speed, scale, and high availability of our global infrastructure. You can provision a full VMware Cloud Foundation environment on Azure and gain compute and storage elasticity as your business needs change. Azure VMware Solution is VMware Cloud Verified, giving customers confidence they're using the complete set of VMware capabilities, with consistency, performance, and interoperability for their VMware workloads.

Access to VMware technology and experiences

Azure VMware Solution allows you to leverage your existing investments, in VMware skills and tools. Customers can maintain operational consistency as they accelerate a move to the cloud with the use of familiar VMware technology including VMWare vSphere, HCX, NSX-T, and vSAN. Additionally, the new Azure VMware Solution has an option to add VMware HCX Enterprise, which will enable customers to further simplify their migration efforts to Azure including support for bulk live migrations. HCX also enables customers running older versions of vSphere on-premises to move to newer versions of vSphere seamlessly running on Azure VMware Solution.

Seamless Azure integration

Through integration with Azure management, security, and services, Azure VMware Solution provides the opportunity for customers to continue to build cloud competencies and modernize overtime. Customers maintain the choice to use the native VMware tools and management experiences they are familiar with, and incrementally leverage Azure capabilities as required.

As we look to meet customers where they are today, we are deeply investing in support for hybrid management scenarios, and automation that can streamline the journey. We are excited to announce more about future hybrid capabilities as they relate to Azure VMware Solution, soon.

Leverage Azure Hybrid Benefit pricing for Microsoft workloads

Take advantage of Azure as the best cloud for your Microsoft workloads running in Azure VMware Solution with unmatched pricing benefits for Windows Server and SQL Server. Azure Hybrid Benefit extends to Azure VMware Solution allowing customers with software assurance to maximize the value of existing on-premises Windows Server and SQL Server license investments when migrating or extending to Azure. In addition, Azure VMware Solution customers are also eligible for three years of free Extended Security Updates on 2008 versions of Windows Server and SQL Server. The combination of these unmatched pricing benefits on Azure ensures customers can simplify cloud adoption with cost efficiencies across their VMware environments.

In addition, at general availability Reserved Instances will also be available for Azure VMware Solution customers, with one-year and three-year options on dedicated hosts.

Global availability and expansion

The Azure VMware Solution preview is initially available in US East and West Europe Azure regions. We expect the new Azure VMware Solution to be generally available in the second half of 2020 and at that time, availability will be extended across more regions. Plans on regional availability for Azure VMware Solution will be made available here as they are disclosed.

Source: azure.microsoft.com

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Moving your VMware resources to Azure is easier than ever

We announced the Azure VMware Solution to deliver a comprehensive VMware environment allowing you to run native VMware-based workloads on Azure. It’s a fully managed platform as a service (PaaS) that includes vSphere, vCenter, vSAN, NSX-T, and corresponding tools.

The VMware environment runs natively on Azure’s bare metal infrastructure, so there’s no nested virtualization and you can continue using your existing VMware tools. There’s no need to worry about operating, scaling, or patching the VMware physical infrastructure or re-platforming your virtual machines. The other benefit of this solution is that you can stretch your on-premises subnets into Azure. It’s like connecting another location to your VMware environment, only that location happens to be in Azure.

We’ve recently published a new episode of Microsoft Mechanics featuring Markus Hain, Senior Program Manager from the Azure engineering team. In this episode, Markus walks through the experience of coming from an on-premises VMware vSphere environment, provisioning an Azure VMware Solution private cloud, getting both environments to communicate, and what you can do once the service is up and running.

Beyond building out and configuring the environment, Markus explains how the hybrid networking works to connect VMware sites and how the service translates bidirectional traffic between virtual networks used in Azure with virtual LANs (VLANs) used in VMware.

Once the services are running, it’s easy to vMotion as you normally would between VMware sites. We show a simple vMotion migration to move virtual machine workloads into Azure. As your VMware workloads start to run in Azure you can take advantage of integrating Azure services seamlessly to existing VMware workloads. For example, your developers can create new VMware virtual machines inside the Azure portal leveraging the same VMware templates from the on-premises environment, and ultimately running those virtual machines in your VMware private cloud in Azure.

Virtual machines created in the Azure portal will be visible, accessible, and run in the VMware vSphere environment. You have the flexibility to manage those resources as you normally would in vSphere, Azure, or both. The environments are deeply integrated at the API level to ensure that what you see in either experience is synchronized. This enables hybrid management, as well as allowing your developers to manage both Azure and VMware resources using a single Azure Resource Manager template.

What’s more, you can monitor those virtual machines like you would Azure infrastructure as a service (IaaS) virtual machines and connect them to the broad set of resources across data, compute, networking, storage, and more. In fact, Markus shows how you can configure an application gateway running in Azure to load balance inbound traffic to your virtual machines running in the Azure VMware Solution. Since this is a truly hybrid and deeply integrated set of services, there’s really no limit to how you architect your apps and solutions, and like a native cloud service, you can benefit from the elasticity of the number of VMware nodes you’ll need to match seasonal or otherwise variable demand.

Right now, the Azure VMware Solution by CloudSimple is available in East US and West US regions. Western Europe is coming next, and we’ll add more regions over the coming months. To get started, just search for “vmware” while signed into the Azure portal and provision the service, nodes, and virtual machines. You’ll then be on your way to running your own private cloud in Azure!

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General availability of Azure Site Recovery Deployment Planner for VMware and Hyper-V

I am excited to announce the general availability (GA) of the Azure Site Recovery Deployment Planner for VMware and Hyper-V. This tool helps VMware and Hyper-V enterprise customers to understand their on-premises networking requirements, Microsoft Azure compute and storage requirements for successful Azure Site Recovery replication, and test failover or failover of their applications.

Apart from understanding infrastructure requirements, our customers also needed a way to estimate the total disaster recovery (DR) cost to Azure. In this GA release, we have added detailed estimated DR cost to Azure for your environment. You can generate a report with the latest Azure prices based on your subscription, the offer that is associated with your subscription, and the target Azure region for the specified currency. The Deployment Planner report gives you cost for compute, storage, network, and Azure Site Recovery licenses.

Key features of the tool

◉ The Deployment Planner can be run without having to install any Azure Site Recovery components to your on-premises environment.

◉ The tool does not impact the performance of production servers, as no direct connection is made to them. All performance data is collected from the Hyper-V server or VMware vCenter Server/VMware vSphere ESXi Server, which hosts the production virtual machines.

What aspects does the Azure Site Recovery Deployment Planner cover?

As you move from a proof of concept to a production rollout of Azure Site Recovery, we strongly recommend running the Deployment Planner. The tool provides following details:

Compatibility assessment

◉ A VM eligibility assessment to protect to Azure with Site Recovery

Network bandwidth need vs. RPO assessment

◉ The estimated network bandwidth that's required for delta replication
◉ The throughput that Site Recovery can get from on-premises to Azure
◉ RPO that can be achieved for a given bandwidth
◉ Impact on the desired RPO if lower bandwidth is provisioned

Microsoft Azure infrastructure requirements

◉ The storage type (standard or premium storage account) requirement for each virtual machine
◉ The total number of standard and premium storage accounts to be set up for replication
◉ The storage-account placement for all virtual machines
◉ The number of Azure cores to be set up before test failover or failover on the subscription
◉ The Azure VM-recommended size for each on-premises VM

On-premises infrastructure requirements

◉ The required free storage on each of volume of Hyper-V storage for successful initial replication and delta replication
◉ Maximum copy frequency to be set for Hyper-V replication
◉ The required number of Configuration Servers and Process Servers to be deployed on-premises for ◉ VMware to Azure scenario

Initial replication batching guidance

◉ Number of virtual machines that can be replicated to Azure in parallel to complete initial replication

Estimated DR cost to Azure

◉ Estimated total DR cost to Azure: compute, storage, network, and Azure Site Recovery license cost
◉ Detail cost analysis per virtual machine
◉ Specifies replication cost and the DR-Drill cost

Factoring future growth

◉ All the above factors are impacted after considering possible future growth of the on-premises workloads with increased usage

How does the Deployment Planner work?

The Deployment Planner has three main modes of operation:

◉ Profiling
◉ Report generation
◉ Throughput calculation

Profiling

In this mode, you profile all the on-premises servers that you want to protect over a few days, e.g. 30 days. The tool stores various performance counters like R/W IOPS, Write IOPS, and data churn, as well as other virtual machine characteristics like number of cores, number/size of disks, number of NICs, ect., by connecting to the Hyper-V server or the VMware vCenter Server/VMware vSphere ESXi Server where the virtual machines are hosted.

Report generation

In this mode, the tool uses the profiled data to generate a deployment planning report in Microsoft Excel format. The report has six to eight sheets based on the virtualization type:

◉ On-premises summary
◉ Recommendations
◉ Virtual machine to storage placement
◉ Compatible VMs
◉ Incompatible VMs
◉ On-premises storage requirement (only for Hyper-V)
◉ Initial replication batching (only for Hyper-V)
◉ Cost estimation

By default, the tool takes the 95th percentile of all profiled performance metrics and includes a growth factor of 30%. Both these parameters, percentile calculation and growth factor, are configurable.

Throughput calculation

In this mode, the tool finds the network throughput that can be achieved from your on-premises environment to Microsoft Azure for replication. This will help you determine what additional bandwidth you need to provision for replication.

With Azure Site Recovery’s promise of full application recovery on Microsoft Azure, through deployment planning is critical for disaster recovery. With the Deployment Planner, we will ensure that both brand new deployments and existing deployments get the best replication experience and application performance when running on Microsoft Azure.

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