Microsoft Expanding Azure VMware Solutions To Eight Regions

The regional expansion of Azure VMware Solutions is based on customer demand and will be across the United States, Western Europe and Asia-Pacific, according to Arpan Shah, general manager of Microsoft Azure.

Microsoft Azure plans to expand the availability of Azure VMware Solutions to eight regions and add Azure NetApp Files as a supported storage option by year’s end.

VMware parent company Dell Technologies and Microsoft announced Azure VMware Solutions – which is built on VMware Cloud Foundation and allows VMware workloads to run natively on Azure -- at Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas in April. Customers currently can move or extend their on-premises VMware environments to Azure using Azure VMware Solution by CloudSimple. Azure VMware Solution by Virtustream is expected to be available later this year.

The regional expansion of Azure VMware Solutions is based on customer demand and will be across the United States, Western Europe and Asia-Pacific, according to a blog post today by Arpan Shah, general manager of Microsoft Azure.

“Since announcing Azure VMware Solutions at Dell Technologies World this spring, we’ve been energized by the positive feedback we’ve received from our partners and customers who are beginning to move their VMware workloads to Azure,” Shah said.

Microsoft Azure declined to reveal which new regions would be included. Azure VMware Solution by CloudSimple currently is generally available in Microsoft Azure’s East US and West US regions, according to its website, which says general availability for the Canada Central, South Central US and West US2 regions is expected in this year’s fourth quarter. The service also will become available in the West Europe region “in the near future,” according to the site.

The addition of Azure NetApp Files support will allow information technology organizations to more easily run storage-intensive workloads on Azure VMware Solutions, according to Shah. Microsoft announced the general availability of Azure NetApp Files, its bare-metal cloud file storage and data management service, in late May.

Microsoft Azure partners including software providers RiverMeadow Software, Zerto and Veeam Software are building tools and capabilities to support Azure VMware Solutions customers.

Los Gatos, Calif.-based RiverMeadow in June announced that it supports the migration of VMware environments on Azure VMware Solutions with its software-as-a-service-based cloud migration platform and services.

“I fully expect to see substantial enterprise adoption over the short term as we work with Microsoft’s customers to help them migrate even the most complex workloads to Azure,” RiverMeadow CEO Jim Jordan said.

Zerto, whose U.S. offices are in Boston, has integrated its IT Resilience Platform with Azure VMware Solutions to offer replication and failover capabilities.

“VMware customers gain immediate access to simple point-and-click disaster recovery and migration capabilities between Azure VMware Solutions, the rest of Azure and on-premises VMware private clouds,” said Peter Kerr, Zerto’s vice president of global alliances.

Veeam Backup & Replication software, which supports VMware vSphere environments, helps meet backup demands of organizations deploying Azure VMware Solutions.

“Customers can easily migrate and protect their VMware workloads in Azure as part of a cloud-first initiative, create an Azure-based DR (disaster recovery) strategy, or simply create new Azure IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) instances… with the same proven Veeam solutions they already use today,” said Ken Ringdahl, vice president of global alliances architecture for the Baar, Switzerland-based Veeam.