Enterprises nowadays manage a very diverse and complex IT infrastructure that expands from on-premises to edge and multi-cloud. Navigating these distributed hybrid and multi-cloud scenarios becomes a challenge when managing business-critical applications and building cloud-native software.
In these types of environments, it is very important to have a consistent approach to operations and select the proper tools that allows you to have greater cross-visibility and work at scale. That is why customers have taken advantage of Azure to enable the flexibility and agility IT professionals and developers are seeking. With Azure Arc, customers can now extend the rich Azure management and services offerings to any infrastructure, including their VMware deployments on-premises or in the cloud.
Whether you are migrating your VMware virtual machine workloads to Azure or building a hybrid architecture, there is an Azure Arc solution that allows you to leverage your existing investments in VMware-based infrastructure and continue to innovate and enhance your experience in Azure.
Azure Arc-enabled VMware vSphere
Administrators managing vSphere environments might be facing some challenges to help their organization be more agile by providing the needed infrastructure for developers while maintaining management, governance, and security practices. Those requirements are usually more challenging especially if you are managing a large, distributed vSphere and/or multi-cloud environments.
With Azure Arc-enabled VMware vSphere, customers can extend the Azure management plane including management, governance, and security capabilities to your VMware vSphere infrastructure, allowing them to provide a unified, self-service experience for their developers so they can provision VMware virtual machines and manage its lifecycle from the Azure portal, directly on top of the on-premises vSphere environment, all while administrators can maintain the needed role-based access control, security controls and governance practices.
They can easily start/stop/restart their VMs from the Azure portal, update network interfaces, update VM size (CPU cores, memory), and seamlessly run scripts on their VMs at scale using VM extensions.
DevOps engineers can now use their existing CI/CD pipelines to deploy and manage virtual machines using infrastructure-as-code dynamically and much faster and more as they deploy new applications and services to their customers.
As an IT administrator, Azure Arc-enabled VMware vSphere allows you to frictionlessly on-board your VMware virtual machines to Azure Arc by enabling guest OS management, which brings additional capabilities to your management toolset like a consolidated inventory of virtual machines running in Azure, on-premises, or in a multi-cloud environment, Azure Monitor, Azure Log Analytics, Microsoft Defender for Servers, Azure Policy guest configuration and much more.
You can also manage access to the VMware resources using Azure Role-based access control (RBAC) to provide the right level of authorization to your users.
Azure Migrate + Azure Arc-enabled servers
If you are migrating your on-premises workloads to Azure and performing a “lift-and-shift” type of migration, you are very likely going to use Azure Migrate as a way to replicate your VMs to the cloud.
The service offers the option to run an assessment on your current VMware vSphere hosted workloads and determine the sizing, cloud readiness, and costs estimates along with several migration paths that include agentless and agent-based replication.
The way Azure Migrate works is through a lightweight virtual appliance that is deployed in your VMware environment. Once deployed, it will take care of the discovery, assessment, and VM migration. You will be able to replicate your VMware VMs to Azure and once migrated, manage, and operate them from the cloud.
But how about virtual machines that may not be the ideal candidate for migration or simply constrained to remain on-premises?!
For these VMs, you have the option to onboard on-premises VMware VMs to Azure Arc via the Azure Migrate: discovery and assessment tool. This way you get to scale onboard the VMs as part of the assessment and manage them with a single pane of glass with Azure management whether they remain on-premises or not.
Azure Migrate allows for the following use cases:
- Intent-based onboarding of VMware virtual machines to Azure Arc at the time of the migration process.
- At-scale onboarding of discovered servers
- Ability to provide resource details (like the portal experience for Azure Arc)
- Ability to track success / failure and retry onboarding
Azure Arc-enabled Azure VMware Solution (AVS)
There is also a solution for those of you that might be using VMware in Azure via Azure VMware Solution (AVS). AVS allows you to move VMware-based workloads from your datacenter to Azure or integrate an existing VMware environment with Azure. It enables a very quick migration path as you do not need to re-platform the VMs and you have the option to keep managing it with the known VMware tools ecosystem.
To fully take advantage of what Azure has to offer and to modernize AVS operations, you can Arc- enable your VMware VMs running on AVS so you enable CRUD operations for virtual machines onboarded via Azure Arc-enabled Azure VMware Solution private cloud, and enable guest management as well install Azure extensions.
Just like Azure Arc-enabled vSphere, this Arc integration with AVS allows a completely automated and scale onboarding experience of your AVS workloads via a Resource Bridge virtual appliance that will discover them automatically and deploy the agent for you.
Getting started
- Try out the new Azure Arc Jumpstart scenario for Azure Arc-enabled VMware vSphere
- Visit our official documentation
Learn more in the Hybrid Azure Hybrid, Multi-cloud, and Edge Day digital event
On Wednesday, June 15, 2022, 9:00 AM–10:30 AM Pacific Time (UTC-7), we will be hosting our annual Hybrid Azure Hybrid, Multicloud, and Edge Day digital event, where you will hear from Microsoft leadership and subject matter experts from the Azure hybrid engineering... listen to customer stories, and get to ask all the questions you need in order to make the right decisions.
