Why Microsoft and VMware Are Joining Forces

Enterprise IT teams are under constant pressure to extend critical infrastructure to the cloud faster and with less disruption. To address this, Microsoft and VMware have collaborated to deliver a deeper iteration of Azure VMware Solution (AVS)—an offering engineered by Microsoft and endorsed by VMware that lets organisations move existing VMware-based workloads to Azure without re-architecting applications or retraining staff.

According to Eric Lockard, Corporate Vice President for Azure Dedicated at Microsoft, the partnership goes well beyond a licensing arrangement:

“Microsoft and VMware have emerged to become close partners determined to deliver a win-win for both companies and our shared customers. 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

Azure VMware Solution is designed to feel like a natural extension of an existing on-premises VMware environment rather than a migration to an unfamiliar platform. Key characteristics of the solution include:

• Native VMware experience: Customers continue using familiar VMware tools—vSphere, vSAN, NSX-T, and HCX—without modification.
• Full Azure Portal integration: AVS is managed through the same Azure Portal used for all other Azure services, unifying operational visibility.
• Access to the Azure service catalogue: Once workloads run in AVS, teams can consume Azure-native services such as Azure Monitor, Azure Security Center, machine learning services, and IoT hubs alongside VMware compute.
• Flexible consumption models: Organisations can treat AVS as standard Azure compute, paying on a subscription basis and scaling capacity up or down without upfront hardware investment.

Lockard frames AVS as applicable to three distinct enterprise postures:

1. All-in on Azure: Organisations that want a single cloud while preserving their VMware compute platform.
2. Abstraction-layer approach: Teams that want to avoid perceived vendor constraints by running workloads on a consistent VMware layer regardless of the underlying cloud.
3. Multi-cloud strategy: Enterprises that intentionally spread workloads across multiple clouds, using VMware as the common operational fabric.

What Is Driving Enterprise Cloud Demand?

Lockard identifies a range of practical motivations pushing organisations toward the cloud, regardless of industry:

• OpEx over CapEx: The ability to pay by the day or month rather than investing in depreciating hardware.
• Elastic capacity (“burstiness”): Spinning up additional compute for a new project or seasonal demand spike without provisioning permanent infrastructure.
• Disaster recovery and backup: Using cloud as a failover target without maintaining a full secondary data centre.
• Hardware management offload: Freeing engineering teams from firmware updates, hardware replacement cycles, and data-centre operations.

The Deeper Trend: Every Company Is Becoming a Software Company

Beyond individual use cases, Lockard points to a more structural shift that he believes will sustain long-term cloud growth. In his view, differentiation in virtually every industry now depends on software and data analytics rather than physical assets or traditional processes alone.

“Every company is increasingly a software company. Pharmaceuticals—that’s a software business. It is all about taking massive amounts of sample data and analysing 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, whether it’s optimisation of manufacturing or e-commerce.”

Eric Lockard, Corporate Vice President, Azure Dedicated, Microsoft

This framing has direct implications for how organisations should think about their VMware estates. Rather than viewing on-premises VMware infrastructure as a liability to be replaced, Lockard’s argument is that it becomes the foundation from which enterprises can layer on cloud-native capabilities—machine learning, IoT pipelines, real-time analytics—without disrupting the applications already running on it.

Key Takeaways for DevOps and Infrastructure Teams

• AVS lowers migration risk by letting teams move VMware VMs to Azure without converting them to native Azure VMs first—useful when application owners are risk-averse or timelines are tight.
• It is not a legacy crutch. The intent is that AVS workloads can progressively consume Azure-native services, enabling a gradual modernisation path rather than a hard cutover.
• The Microsoft/VMware endorsement model matters operationally: Support cases involving the underlying VMware stack are handled jointly, reducing the finger-pointing that can occur with third-party VMware cloud providers.
• Multi-cloud use cases are explicitly supported, meaning organisations already using VMware Cloud on AWS or on-premises VMware can extend to Azure without abandoning their existing operational model.

Looking Ahead

The partnership signals that both Microsoft and VMware see the hybrid and multi-cloud model as the dominant enterprise architecture for the foreseeable future. For DevOps and infrastructure engineers, the practical outcome is a more integrated toolchain: VMware’s operational familiarity combined with Azure’s breadth of managed services, all accessible through a single control plane.

Teams evaluating AVS should assess their current VMware licence agreements, Azure Reserved Instance pricing for dedicated hosts, and the specific Azure services they intend to consume alongside VMware compute—these factors will determine the total cost of ownership relative to alternatives such as refactoring to native Azure VMs or adopting containers.