In This Blog
- What is Azure VMware Solution?
- Benefits of Azure VMware Solution
- Maximize Your VMware Investments
- Improve Operational Efficiency
- Comprehensive Security and Compliance
- Increased Agility and Scalability
- Move from CapEx to OpEx
- Quickly Extend Your Data Center
- Achieve Disaster Recovery Goals
- Single Pane of Glass for Hybrid Cloud
- What to Expect When You Choose Emergent Software
- How Emergent Software Can Help
- Final Thoughts
- Frequently Asked Questions
TL;DR
- Azure VMware Solution lets you migrate to Azure while keeping your existing VMware tools, skills, and investments. No need to refactor applications or retrain teams.
- AVS shifts infrastructure spending from CapEx to OpEx, allowing you to scale VMware clusters in minutes and pay only for the resources you actually use.
- Extend your on-premises data center to Azure in days, enabling hybrid scenarios like disaster recovery, capacity expansion, and gradual migration at your own pace.
- Centralized management through vCenter and Azure Arc provides a single pane of glass for security, governance, and operations across hybrid environments.
- Emergent Software follows Microsoft's Cloud Adoption Framework to assess, design, migrate, and train your team for long-term AVS success.
- Getting started through Azure Marketplace is straightforward. Reach out to Emergent Software to discuss your AVS migration project.
This blog is part of a series of articles on our Azure Marketplace solutions. To learn more about Azure Marketplace and how you can use it to find the right technology services and providers for your business, read this Guide to Azure Marketplace.
What is Azure VMware Solution?
Azure VMware Solution (AVS) lets you run VMware workloads natively on Azure infrastructure. This means you can migrate your VMware-based applications and infrastructure to Azure without refactoring, re-architecting, or retraining your team on new tools.
For organizations with significant VMware investments, AVS addresses a common migration challenge: how do you take advantage of cloud benefits without abandoning the tools, skills, and processes your team already knows? AVS provides the answer by bringing your familiar VMware environment to Azure.
Benefits of Azure VMware Solution
AVS delivers the scalability, security, and operational benefits of Azure while preserving your VMware investments. Here's what that means in practice.
Maximize Your VMware Investments
If you have existing VMware investments, skills, and tools — VMware vSphere, vCenter, and NSX-T — you can continue using them while gaining cloud benefits. Your team doesn't need to learn new technologies. Your existing processes remain intact. Your VMware certifications and expertise stay relevant.
This continuity matters. Migrating to the cloud is disruptive enough without forcing your team to simultaneously adopt completely new platforms and tooling. AVS eliminates that friction by letting you run VMware workloads on Azure without translation layers or compromises.
Improve Operational Efficiency
AVS enables centralized management of VMware workloads in Azure. You use the same vCenter interface you're familiar with, but now you're managing cloud resources with the elasticity and global reach that Azure provides.
This centralization simplifies operations. Instead of managing separate tools for on-premises and cloud environments, you have a unified view. Provisioning, monitoring, and troubleshooting work the same way whether resources run in your data center or Azure.
Comprehensive Security and Compliance
You gain access to Microsoft's cloud security capabilities. Azure tools like Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Azure Sentinel integrate with your AVS environment, providing threat detection, security monitoring, and compliance reporting.
AVS inherits Azure's compliance certifications, which helps meet regulatory requirements across industries and geographies. Your VMware workloads benefit from the same security posture as other Azure services, with encryption, identity management, and network security controls built in.
Increased Agility and Scalability
In a traditional data center, scaling VMware infrastructure means procurement, installation, and configuration of physical hardware. That process takes weeks or months.
With AVS, you scale your VMware clusters and hosts in minutes. Need additional capacity for a new application? Add nodes to your cluster. Testing a disaster recovery scenario? Spin up temporary resources. When requirements change, scale back down. You match resources to actual needs without the constraints of physical hardware.
Move from CapEx to OpEx
Traditional VMware infrastructure requires significant capital investment. You purchase servers, storage, and networking equipment upfront. You forecast capacity years in advance and hope you estimated correctly.
Migrating to AVS shifts this model to operational expenditure. You pay for the resources you use on an ongoing basis. Need more capacity? Scale up and pay for it. Don't need it anymore? Scale down and stop paying for it. Your costs align directly with business activity rather than upfront predictions.
Quickly Extend Your Data Center
AVS lets you extend your existing VMware infrastructure to Azure in days, not months. You're not replacing your data center, you're augmenting it with cloud capacity that integrates seamlessly with on-premises resources.
This extension provides flexibility for scenarios like capacity expansion, dev/test environments, and temporary workload bursts. You maintain your on-premises infrastructure where it makes sense while leveraging Azure for what it does best.
Achieve Disaster Recovery Goals
AVS serves as a disaster recovery target for on-premises VMware environments. You replicate workloads to Azure and fail over when needed, with recovery times measured in minutes rather than hours or days.
This approach reduces disaster recovery costs compared to maintaining a secondary physical data center. You pay for storage and minimal compute capacity during normal operations, then scale up compute resources only when failover occurs.
Single Pane of Glass for Hybrid Cloud
When you use AVS with Azure Arc-enabled VMware on-premises, you achieve centralized security and management across your entire VMware estate. You apply consistent policies, monitor security posture, and manage resources from a single interface regardless of where workloads actually run.
This unified view simplifies governance. Security policies, compliance requirements, and operational procedures apply consistently across on-premises and cloud environments. You eliminate the complexity of managing disconnected systems with different tooling and processes.
What to Expect When You Choose Emergent Software
As with all of our Azure cloud services, we follow the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) throughout the AVS migration process. This means we take a structured approach that's proven across thousands of migrations.
We start by assessing your current VMware environment. What workloads are running? What dependencies exist? What performance characteristics matter? This assessment informs the design phase, where we architect your AVS solution to meet your specific requirements.
Next, we set up Azure landing zones; the foundational infrastructure that supports your AVS deployment. This includes networking, security, identity, and governance configurations that ensure your AVS environment operates securely and efficiently.
Once the foundation is in place, we test and validate the solution before migrating production workloads. This testing phase identifies and resolves issues in a controlled environment, minimizing risk when actual migration occurs.
Finally, we migrate your VMs to AVS using proven tools and processes that minimize downtime and data loss. But the engagement doesn't end there. We provide training and documentation for your team, ensuring they understand how to manage and maintain the AVS environment going forward.
This approach ensures your cloud transition is truly seamless. Not just technically successful, but operationally sustainable.
How Emergent Software Can Help
We specialize in Azure cloud migrations, including Azure VMware Solution implementations. Our team follows Microsoft's Cloud Adoption Framework to assess your environment, design your AVS solution, establish landing zones, test and validate the configuration, and migrate your workloads. We also provide the training and documentation your team needs to manage AVS confidently after migration. Beyond AVS, we offer ongoing managed services, disaster recovery planning, and cloud optimization to ensure your Azure environment continues delivering value.
If this sounds familiar, we can help.
Final Thoughts
Azure VMware Solution solves a specific problem: how do you gain cloud benefits without abandoning your VMware investments? For organizations with significant VMware infrastructure, expertise, and processes, AVS provides a migration path that preserves what works while adding the scalability, security, and operational flexibility of Azure.
The key to successful AVS adoption is following a structured approach that accounts for your specific environment and requirements. Assessment, design, testing, and migration done properly results in an environment that your team can manage confidently with tools they already know.
If you're ready to explore how Azure VMware Solution can modernize your infrastructure while preserving your VMware investments, Emergent Software is here to help. Reach out, we'd love to learn more about your goals.
Frequently Asked Questions
What's the difference between AVS and standard Azure migration?
Standard Azure migration typically requires refactoring applications to run on Azure native services like Azure VMs, Azure SQL Database, or Azure App Service. Azure VMware Solution lets you run VMware workloads on Azure without modification. You use the same VMware tools — vCenter, vSphere, NSX-T — that you use on-premises. For organizations with significant VMware investments and expertise, AVS provides a migration path that doesn't require retraining teams or rewriting applications. The trade-off is that AVS may cost more than fully optimized Azure native services, but the reduced migration complexity and faster time to value often outweigh the cost difference.
Can we run both on-premises VMware and AVS simultaneously?
Yes. AVS is designed for hybrid scenarios where you maintain on-premises VMware infrastructure while running workloads in Azure. You can establish connectivity between your data center and AVS, enabling scenarios like disaster recovery, capacity bursting, and gradual migration. Azure Arc extends management capabilities across both environments, providing unified governance and security policies. This hybrid approach lets you move to Azure at your own pace, migrating workloads when it makes business sense rather than forcing a wholesale transition.
How long does AVS migration typically take?
Timeline depends on environment complexity and the number of workloads being migrated. A small deployment with a handful of VMs might take a few weeks from assessment to production cutover. Larger environments with hundreds of VMs, complex networking, and multiple dependencies can take several months. The assessment phase typically takes one to two weeks, design and landing zone setup another two to four weeks, and migration execution varies based on workload count and acceptable downtime windows. We provide a detailed timeline during the assessment phase once we understand your specific environment and requirements.
What happens to our VMware licenses when we migrate to AVS?
AVS includes VMware licensing as part of the Azure service cost. You don't need to bring your own VMware licenses or manage licensing separately. Microsoft handles the relationship with VMware, and you pay for AVS nodes through your Azure consumption. This simplifies procurement and eliminates the need to manage VMware renewals separately from Azure costs. For organizations with existing VMware Enterprise License Agreements, we can help you understand how AVS fits into your overall licensing strategy and whether any cost optimization opportunities exist.
Can AVS handle our compliance and regulatory requirements?
Yes. AVS inherits Azure's compliance certifications, which cover major frameworks including HIPAA, SOC 2, PCI-DSS, ISO 27001, and many others. Your VMware workloads running on AVS benefit from the same compliance posture as other Azure services. Microsoft maintains these certifications and provides documentation to support your audits. You remain responsible for configuring your applications and data to meet your specific compliance requirements, but the underlying infrastructure provides the certifications you need. We can help design your AVS environment to meet specific regulatory requirements during the assessment and design phases.
What support is available after AVS migration is complete?
We provide training and documentation as part of the migration engagement to ensure your team can manage AVS confidently. After migration, you can choose the level of ongoing support that makes sense for your organization. Options include managed services where we handle day-to-day operations, support services where we provide assistance when issues arise, or you can manage AVS entirely on your own using the skills your team already has. Many clients start with managed services to ensure stability after migration, then transition to self-management once their team builds confidence with the AVS environment. We're flexible and can adjust support levels based on your needs.
