This article is based on a source interview with Eric Lockard, Corporate Vice President, Azure Dedicated at Microsoft, originally published by CIO. It was reproduced and expanded here for a DevOps engineering audience.
Why Microsoft and VMware Are Joining Forces on Azure VMware Solution
Enterprise IT teams are under constant pressure to expand infrastructure faster than on-premises hardware allows. Azure VMware Solution (AVS) is Microsoft and VMware’s co-engineered answer to that pressure: a fully managed service that lets organizations run VMware workloads natively on Azure dedicated bare-metal infrastructure, without rewriting applications or retraining operations teams.
The solution is built by Microsoft and endorsed by VMware — a distinction that matters operationally. Customers retain the native VMware experience (vSphere, vSAN, NSX-T) while gaining direct access to Azure services such as Azure Monitor, Azure Security Center, Azure Backup, and ExpressRoute for private connectivity.
“The very name of this solution — Azure VMware Solution — reflects just how collaborative this effort is across engineering, sales, and marketing functions in both companies.”
Eric Lockard, Corporate Vice President, Azure Dedicated, Microsoft
What Azure VMware Solution Actually Delivers
At its core, AVS provisions VMware SDDC (Software-Defined Data Center) clusters on Azure bare-metal nodes. The key operational characteristics for engineering teams include:
- Native VMware stack: vSphere, vCenter, vSAN, and NSX-T run as they do on-premises. Existing runbooks, automation scripts, and monitoring integrations continue to work.
- Azure Portal integration: Provisioning, scaling, and lifecycle management are handled through the Azure Portal, CLI, or ARM templates — the same control plane used for every other Azure resource.
- Direct connectivity to Azure services: AVS private clouds connect to Azure Virtual Networks over a managed ExpressRoute, enabling low-latency access to PaaS services without traffic traversing the public internet.
- VMware HCX for migration: The VMware HCX service is included to simplify live migration and bulk migration of on-premises VMs to AVS with minimal downtime.
- Microsoft SLA and support: Microsoft operates and supports the underlying infrastructure, including hardware replacement and software patching of the VMware components.
How Microsoft Positions AVS for Different Customer Profiles
According to Lockard, AVS is deliberately designed to serve three distinct architectural postures rather than forcing a single migration path:
- All-in on a single cloud with VMware compute: Customers who want to standardize entirely on Azure while preserving VMware as their compute abstraction layer.
- Abstraction-first: Organizations that want to run on a consistent VMware platform to avoid cloud vendor lock-in at the workload level, while still consuming Azure networking and storage services.
- Multi-cloud: Enterprises that know they will operate across multiple public clouds and want VMware’s consistent operational model to span them.
“We are laser-focused on making Azure the best cloud for VMware, and we engineered Azure VMware Solution with the expectation that customers can utilize it as just another flavor of Azure Compute.”
Eric Lockard, Microsoft
What Is Driving Cloud Demand: Common Enterprise Use Cases
Lockard identified several distinct drivers pushing enterprises toward cloud adoption, each reflecting a different business or operational concern:
- OpEx over CapEx: Organizations prefer consumption-based billing (daily or monthly) over large upfront hardware investments.
- Hardware offload: Eliminating the procurement, maintenance, and end-of-life management of physical servers and storage.
- Elastic capacity (“burstiness”): The ability to spin up additional compute for short-duration projects — batch processing, seasonal peaks, or model training — without permanent infrastructure commitment.
- Disaster recovery and failover: Using Azure as a DR target for VMware workloads without building and maintaining a secondary data center.
- Access to cloud-native capabilities: Augmenting existing VMware application estates with Azure-native services such as machine learning, IoT Hub, and data analytics pipelines.
The Broader Trend: Every Company Is a Software Company
Beyond specific use cases, Lockard pointed to a structural shift in how industries consume compute. Sectors traditionally seen as non-technology industries — pharmaceuticals, manufacturing, logistics, retail — are increasingly running their core competitive functions on software and data workloads.
“Pharmaceuticals — that’s a software business. It is all about taking massive amounts of sample data and analyzing it with AI to quickly model and identify the right drug compounds for safe and effective patient treatments. That application of massive computing is happening in every industry.”
Eric Lockard, Microsoft
For DevOps and platform engineering teams, this trend has a direct architectural implication: the application estate that needs to run on VMware today will increasingly need to be complemented by cloud-native data and ML services. AVS is Microsoft and VMware’s answer to bridging that gap without a disruptive rip-and-replace migration.
Key Takeaways for DevOps and Infrastructure Teams
- AVS lets you migrate VMware workloads to Azure without modifying VMs, retraining staff, or replacing existing automation.
- The service is operated and supported by Microsoft, reducing the operational burden on internal infrastructure teams.
- Azure-native services are available over private connectivity, enabling hybrid architectures that mix VMware compute with PaaS-layer capabilities.
- VMware HCX (included with AVS) provides a supported, low-disruption migration path from on-premises vSphere environments.
- The partnership’s co-engineering model means VMware certifications and support contracts remain valid for workloads running on AVS.
For teams evaluating cloud migration strategies, Azure VMware Solution represents a lower-risk on-ramp to Azure — preserving operational continuity while opening access to the broader Azure service ecosystem.