How can you successfully migrate VMware to Azure?

You have VMware assets in an on-premises data centre, but are looking at migrating to Microsoft Azure. 

How do you continue leveraging those VMware investments while leveraging cloud benefits? And how do you make the migration process as seamless as possible?

The answer to both these questions is: Azure VMware Solution (AVS). 

AVS is a way to move or extend on-premises VMware environments to Azure, allowing you to retain your existing assets, skills and tools – while running workloads natively in the cloud.

Here’s how it works.

Lift-and-shift on-prem workloads to a dedicated Azure environment

With AVS, mass migration can be done in weeks instead of months or years. It’s like pressing a button to lift-and-shift your VMware workloads from your data centre to the cloud. Those workloads are then in a dedicated, high-performance and single-tenant environment on Azure. 

This delivers 3 key benefits:

• Fast migration to Azure – without having to refactor or re-architect
• Reduced risk – because there are no service breaks or IP changes during migration
• Continuity for teams – you can operate your Azure environment the same way you do on-premises, using existing VMware skills and tools like vSphere, vSAN and vCenter

Provision and scale your VMware infrastructure on-demand

Capacity planning is very easy with AVS because you can increase capacity in minutes. This means there’s no need to think about medium-term planning or overprovisioning. 

If you need 10 new capacity hosts for your new project, you will get it the same day - ready for mission-critical workloads of even stretched VMware clusters, if needed. You benefit from scalability on-demand, essentially getting VMware as a service.

You also get the management systems, networking services, operating platform and back-end infrastructure required to operate at scale in Azure, because AVS is a first-party Microsoft offering backed by VMware. (Also, Nordcloud is a partner both of Microsoft and VMware, so you get a comprehensive, end-to-end service for AVS).

Use AVS as a springboard for modernisation

AVS is an easy Phase 1 in your cloud journey. And some workloads will stay in the AVS environment. But others will benefit from a Phase 2: modernisation. 

That modernisation journey is easier because you’re in AVS and your data is already in the cloud. You’re already running VMware workloads natively on Azure, so you have direct access to native Azure management, security and services. This means you can consume PaaS and IaaS and test in the environment without the pressure of a forced migration - and easily rollback if needed (something you can’t do with an on-prem data centre). Modernisation is then at the right pace for the business instead of being driven by deadlines such as hardware refresh cycles or data centre exit dates.

And that helps drive stakeholder engagement with the cloud journey. Instead of getting stuck in migration analysis paralysis, you can cut through the inertia. You’re no longer having endless conversations about whether it makes sense to move to the cloud, because the discussion has changed to: “We’re in the cloud – what shall we do?”

Speed up value generation and reduce risk when migrating VMware to Azure 

Nordcloud is a premier Microsoft and VMware partner. We help you streamline the migration process and make the best use of Azure native services to maximise ROI.

Learn more about leveraging Azure VMware Solution.