VMware Will Not Support Virtualisation On Azure

VMware may have seriously dented Microsoft’s hopes of businesses being able to run VMware’s virtualisation technology on Azure.

The virtualisation giant has warned it will not support any such migrations, and that it does not “believe this approach will offer customers a good solution to their hybrid or multi-cloud future.”

Earlier this week Redmond had announced that VMware workloads would be able to be moved onto Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure, in partnership with unnamed VMware-certified partners.

No Support

But VMware has moved quickly to dismiss to this development and has warned any organisations thinking of following this option, that they will do so without any support or blessing from VMware itself.

“Recently, Microsoft announced preview of VMware virtualisation on Azure, a bare-metal solution that is stated to run a VMware stack on Azure hardware, co-located with other Azure services in partnership with VMware-certified partners,” blogged Ajay Patel, senior VP product development, cloud services at VMware.

And Patel went on to warn that this development has not been sanctioned by VMware.

“No VMware-certified partner names have been mentioned nor have any partners collaborated with VMware in engineering this offering,” wrote Patel. “This offering has been developed independent of VMware, and is neither certified nor supported by VMware.”

“Microsoft’s stated intention is to enable this as an intermediary migration solution and not as a solution architected for running enterprise workloads in production,” he added. “Microsoft recognising the leadership position of VMware’s offering and exploring support for VMware on Azure as a superior and necessary solution for customers over Hyper-V or native Azure Stack environments is understandable but, we do not believe this approach will offer customers a good solution to their hybrid or multi-cloud future.”

VMware also warned that public cloud environments require significant engineering to run enterprise workloads.

“Hence, we cannot endorse an unsupported and non-engineered solution that isn’t optimised for the VMware stack,” he wrote. “VMware does not recommend and will not support customers running on the Azure announced partner offering.”

Official Partnerships

Patel pointed to the official partnerships it has struck with Amazon AWS and IBM.

“There is a clear move by enterprise customers to standardise on VMware as the platform that provides both common infrastructure and operations across multiple clouds,” he wrote. “This is what led us to partner with AWS to deliver VMware Cloud on AWS, a co-developed offering that is fully supported and managed by VMware engineers, to deliver a world class experience.”

Patel also cited VMware’s strategic collaboration with IBM to deliver a secure, enterprise hybrid cloud on that platform.

Meanwhile, it remains to be seen how Microsoft will respond to this rejection from VMware.

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