Dell, Microsoft Collaborate to Deliver Azure VMware Solutions

Written by Lynn Haber
April 30, 2019

The goal is to provide business customers with a more seamless experience across VMware and Azure environments.

(Pictured above: Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Dell Technologies’ Michael Dell and VMware’s Pat Gelsinger take the stage at Dell Technologies World, April 29.)

DELL TECHNOLOGIES WORLD — Expanding their long-term partnership, Dell Technologies and Microsoft on Monday announced collaboration that will deliver a fully native, supported and certified VMware cloud infrastructure on Microsoft Azure.

Additionally, the two companies announced that Microsoft 365 and VMware Workspace ONE customers will be able to manage Office 365 across devices via cloud-based integration with Microsoft Intune and Azure Active Directory. VMware will also extend the capabilities of Microsoft Windows Virtual Desktop leveraging VMware Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure.

Satya Nadella, CEO at Microsoft, Michael Dell, chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies, and Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware, made the announcement at Monday’s keynote at Dell Technologies World, being held in Las Vegas April 29 – May 2. More than 15,000 customer and partners are in attendance.

“I’m thrilled to announce the availability of Azure VMware solutions that brings all of the VMware capability natively to Azure and Azure customers, so that every customer has the infrastructure — the best of VMware and the best of Azure,” Nadella told the keynote attendees.

Nadella talked about how across every industry and every workload, digital technology is central to innovation. He pointed to great infrastructure as the fuel. “And, the flexibility at which people can get at the infrastructure – the compute, networking capabilities and storage that’s needed in order to drive their businesses forward,” he said.

“Customers want this hybrid solution, the ability to truly say, something is here and something is there and have the ability to connect them all together. It truly is a hybrid, multicloud world,” said Gelsinger.

Azure VMware Solutions are built on VMware Cloud Foundation — a comprehensive offering of software defined compute, storage, networking and management — deployed in Azure. With these solutions, customers can capitalize on VMware’s broadly deployed and trusted cloud infrastructure while experiencing the power of Microsoft Azure.

Azure VMware Solutions give customers the power to seamlessly migrate, extend and run existing VMware workloads from on-premises environments to Azure without the need to rearchitect applications or retool operations. Customers will be able to build, run, manage and secure new and existing applications across VMware environments and Microsoft Azure while extending a single model for operations based on established tools, skills and processes as part of a hybrid cloud strategy.

Some examples of how Azure VMware Solutions will be applicable to businesses: to support app migration and data center expansion, disaster recovery and business continuity and modern application development.

Azure VMware Solutions enable organizations to tap into Azure’s scale, security and fast provisioning cycles to innovate and modernize applications while also improving performance. By integrating with native Azure services, customers can easily infuse advanced capabilities like…