Reasons to choose Azure VMware service - Azure Tutorial

- [Instructor] In this video, we are going to be looking at Why Use Azure VMware Solution? This is the all important question that I like to answer whenever I'm learning a new technology. Before we can answer why use Azure VMware Solution, let me give you a very quick understanding of what this solution is all about. Of course, we'll be getting into a lot more detail as the course progresses, but suffice to understand that Azure VMware Solution is about running VMware natively in Azure, as you can see in this picture. All of the functionalities and capabilities that you know for VMware are available to you, except it is in Azure, and now you can combine them with other Azure services. So with this understanding, let's go and try to answer the question: Why use Azure VMware Solution? First and foremost, it provides a fast path to adopting the cloud. Each organization's cloud transformation is unique and based on its own requirements, and Azure VMware Solution provides a fast path for you to adopt the cloud without having to reformat your existing assets. You can migrate your existing assets without incurring the steep cost of refactoring these applications. You can also reduce your data center footprint and we see this often. You get a C-suite mandate to exit a data center or come out of a lease. Azure VMware Solution gives you a nice way to approach reducing the footprint. Next, you may want to just set up disaster recovery or business continuity. You want to continue to run on-premises, but you want to have a disaster recovery and a business continuity site, and this is a great solution for that as well. The next one is you want to modernize your workloads. So today, your applications are running as a collection of virtual machines. You want to incrementally modernize these applications by taking advantage of Azure-native services. And then finally, you can also take advantage of the cloud virtual desktops. And we saw that this was an important use case during the COVID lockdown where a number of companies, and I worked with a number of customers who had to do this, suddenly they had to take hundreds and even thousands of workers from their office locations and had to start working from home. And cloud virtual desktops powered by Azure VMware, rephrase, Azure VMware Solution, was a very helpful solution for them. Let's look at Azure VMware Solution in the context of the overall cloud migration strategy. You've heard of 5Rs. Of course, I'm only showing you 4Rs here: rehost, refactor, rearchitect, and rebuild. Of course, the fifth R is reimagine. What I want you to take away from this slide is that Azure VMware Solutions gives you a very effective approach of rehosting your application. The next thing that we want to talk about is you are familiar with VMware solution with other major clouds. So you're thinking to yourself, "Well, how's this different? How's Azure VMware Solution different from what is being offered on other clouds?" And that's a great question. Let me try to give you some advantages of why you would want to go to Azure VMware Solution. So the first thing that we want to talk about are the lower cost for running Microsoft applications. So if you're a Windows shop or a SQL Server shop, you might be running maybe an older version of SQL Server. For example, SQL Server 2012 R2, which is nearing the end of life. And if you're interested in getting security updates, typically these security updates can cost somewhere between 75% to 125% of the base license. By running Windows 2012 or SQL Server 2012 R2 in AVS, you get the security updates for free. The other benefit you have is you have the availability to use Azure Hybrid Benefit program. So you have on-premises licenses that you want to use in the cloud. This is a unique benefit to Azure and to AVS. In addition to the lower cost of the software applications, there's also an advantage in terms of the operations. So you have a simplified multi-environment view. What do I mean by that? So you get one bill for Azure VMware Solution and the rest of the Azure services. You can use Azure templates. Later on in this course, you will see that I'll be using Azure templates to provision the Azure VMware Solution, so you can co-mingle these solutions. And then finally, if you're a developer, there are few advantages here as well. First and foremost, as I mentioned earlier, you can modernize these applications. You can start taking advantage of cloud-native Azure services. And one other big important advantage here is that you can integrate the virtual machines that are hosted inside AVS directly into the Azure portal. So from a developer's perspective, the resource hosted inside AVS are no different than resources hosted inside Azure. So it gives you a single pane of class management across your resources. And then the final point I would like to make from a developer perspective is that you get integrated identity management. So if you are managing assets across VMware and Azure environments, you can use the same identity surface. In this slide, we want to talk about cost savings enabled by Azure VMware Solution. And specifically, I want to point you to a case study that was conducted recently. Keep in mind this case study applies to AWS VMware Service, but the key concepts apply to Azure VMware Solution as well. I've provided a link to the case study, so you can explore it in depth on your own time, but I want to give you some of the highlights. First and foremost, about 55.9% reduction in annual data center operating costs. And if you're wondering, "How did that come about?" Well, because you're not responsible for managing all the tooling, the patching, upgrades, hardware refreshes, and configuration management. About a 53.4% reduction in infrastructure and operation costs. Keep in mind that you are consistently using the skills that your organizations may possess related to VMware. You're using those skills when you're deploying Azure VMware Solution. So there is a significant saving in labor hours in terms of teaching new skills. And then finally, about 41% savings in migration as a percentage of your VMware cost in the cloud. So how does this saving come about? This is because often, organizations have desired to move into the cloud, but they recognize that they have to take advantage of cloud-native capabilities, and they would have to retool and rearchitect their core capabilities, and this can be a significant hurdle for the organization as it requires rearchitecting your applications. By moving your applications as is, you are realizing significant migration savings. One final point before we end this slide. The cost savings make sense when you have a sizable workload to migrate. So in this case study, they included about 800 VMs. So you have to have a certain threshold before it makes sense to provision a service like Azure VMware Solution, which requires a minimum of three bare metal hosts, which is not a trivial cost. The final slide that we want to talk about as part of this video is going beyond server virtualization. What do I mean by that? So up until now, we've been saying you can run VMware natively in Azure, which often means that you're able to run virtualized machines, but Azure VMware Solution can go beyond that. And let me give you a couple of examples. At the recent conference that VMware had about two months ago, VMware Explorer 2022 conference, they talked about a multicloud offering. So Azure VMware Solution is an offering on Azure. They have other offerings for other public clouds, and they talked about providing a common control plane. So think a common resource graph across these multiple clouds. That's one benefit. Up until now, we've been talking about virtual machines, but they also give you this ability to run a standardized Kubernetes cluster inside AVS. And think about it for a moment. Now you're able to run a Kubernetes cluster in one cloud, you can extend it to other clouds. And then finally, they also give you this ability to run the Tanzu Application Platform. As you have seen in this slide right here, Azure VMware Solution can go beyond just server virtualization. It can give you benefits like multicloud offering, standardized Kubernetes, and Tanzu Application Platform. So with this, we come to the end of the first video and we have tried to answer the question: Why learn Azure VMware Solution?