VMware is not happy with Microsoft's Azure migration solution

Microsoft recently announced its Azure Migrate service that will free enterprises from paying VMWare tax by migrating their VMware-based applications to Azure. Azure Migrate is a free service for all Azure customers. While most of the leading cloud vendors offer single server migration features, Azure Migrate will help customers in migrating an entire multi-server application. It will provide the guidance, insights, and mechanisms needed to assist enterprise customers in migrating to Azure.

VMWare is not so happy with this migration solution from Microsoft. Ajay Patel, Senior Vice President of Product Development for Cloud Services at VMWare wrote a long blog post saying that VMWare does not support this migration solution from Microsoft.

This offering has been developed independent of VMware, and is neither certified nor supported by VMware. Microsoft’s stated intention is to enable this as an intermediary migration solution and not as a solution architected for running enterprise workloads in production. Microsoft recognizing the leadership position of VMware’s offering and exploring support for VMware on Azure as a superior and necessary solution for customers over Hyper-V or native Azure Stack environments is understandable but, we do not believe this approach will offer customers a good solution to their hybrid or multi-cloud future.

VMWare also mentioned that public cloud environments require significant joint engineering to run enterprise workloads. So they cannot endorse an unsupported and non-engineered solution from Microsoft that isn’t optimized for the VMware stack. The real problem for VMWare is that they have partnered with AWS for a similar solution. It is a co-developed offering that is fully supported and managed by VMware engineers. Basically, VMWare wants customers to use their AWS-based solution and pay them directly.

Microsoft has not yet responded to this unexpected move from VMWare. I’ll update the post when we hear something from Microsoft.