As organizations accelerate their digital transformation, Microsoft provides flexible paths to migrate and modernize applications, enabling businesses to choose the best approach for their needs - whether embracing the cloud, leveraging cloud-managed infrastructure locally, or balancing both. Unified management, governance, and security can be applied across all strategies, empowering organizations to utilize cloud-based tools, policies, and monitoring wherever their workloads reside.
Many organizations operate virtualized environments and can optimize and modernize their infrastructure with several proven approaches. These strategies allow teams to maximize existing investments while exploring new opportunities for agility, cost savings, and growth.
Three Paths to Modernization
- Modernize and Move: For applications ready to evolve, Azure’s IaaS and PaaS offerings provide a secure and scalable foundation to reduce costs, increase agility, and spark innovation. Azure Migrate supports readiness assessments, cost estimates, business case development, and seamless transitions - all while maintaining centralized governance and security throughout the process.
- Lift and Optimize: For VMware customers looking for a fast path to the cloud, Azure VMware Solution (AVS) allows organizations to rehost existing VMware workloads with minimal disruption and no code changes. AVS is a VMware VCF private cloud in Azure that allows organizations to leverage their portable VCF licenses and connect to 200+ Azure services. Customers can use Azure Migrate for assessment and planning, leverage VMware HCX for seamless migrations, and connect Azure Arc for centralized governance, unified management and enhanced security across cloud and hybrid environments.
- Edge-Optimized Deployment: For workloads that need to remain close to where data is created or consumed – whether for low latency, regulatory compliance, data residency, or sovereign requirements - Azure Local leverages Azure Arc to extend Azure services across distributed environments, providing a sovereign, cloud-managed platform with local control. Azure Local and its centralized management enabled by Azure Arc supports OEM hardware partners such as Dell, Lenovo, HPE, and more, ensuring flexibility, operational assurance, and compliance-ready governance.
Enhanced and Unified Management: Across all three options, organizations can enhance their strategy with unified management, governance, and security via Azure control plane - benefiting from cloud-based capabilities no matter where their workloads run.
General Availability: Azure Migrate supports VMware VMs to Azure Local
Today, we are excited to announce the General Availability of Azure Migrate support for migrating VMware VMs to Azure Local. With this release, organizations can easily move their VMware workloads to cloud-managed infrastructure while maintaining consistency across environments.
Key Features
- Orchestrate migrations from Azure portal: Gain full visibility into replication progress, cutover readiness, and migration history.Monitor replication and migration progress with Azure Migrate from cloud control plane
- Leverage an agentless architecture: Simplify deployment across large VMware environments without installing agents on source VMs.
- Replicate with no downtime impact: Keep critical workloads running while data synchronizes in the background.
- Migrate securely with sovereign control: Maintain full data residency and operational sovereignty while keeping all VM migration traffic and data entirely on-premises.
- Perform cutovers with minimal downtime: Use optimized Azure Migrate techniques to reduce disruption.
This GA milestone brings several advanced features shaped by customer and partner feedback during the preview, such as:
- Static IP address retention for Windows and Linux VMs.
- PowerShell migration support for scripting and automation.
- Advanced compute and disk customization during migration.
Get Started!
Ready to get started? Visit Azure Migrate documentation to explore:
- Monthly product updates.
- Prerequisites and requirements.
- Tutorials for VMware to Azure Local VM migrations.
- FAQs and troubleshooting guides.
Thank you to our Community
We’d like to thank all the customers and partners who participated in the preview program and provided invaluable feedback. Your input has directly shaped this GA release, and we’re excited to continue building with you.
Microsoft