Microsoft goes rogue with vSphere on Azure

Microsoft announced a migration service that enables bare metal vSphere hosts within its Azure public cloud service. How is it different than VMware Cloud on AWS.

<Transcript> Hey, How’s it going?

It’s Keith Townsend from The CTO Advisor. You know what I hope you’ve rested up if you’re in the U.S. and you enjoyed your Thanksgiving holiday. Happy Thanksgiving however it’s time to get back on it and next week it’s AWS reinvent.

The other hyper scalers are not sitting and waiting on AWS to take up all of the energy. Of course I’ll will be hosting the cube and having incredible sets of interviews with companies ranging from Stratoscale to VMware  to the whole ecosystem at reinvent.

However, before we get into reinvent there’s a couple of big announcements within the industry that I wanted to get at. First Microsoft, the hyper scalar that we mentioned earlier. When i hinted to hyper scalars are not sitting back waiting on AWS to take up all of the announcements. Microsoft has announced that they will now support VMware vSphere bare metal in Azure.

Is this another VMware on AWS but VMware on Azure? Not exactly, Microsoft is taking a book out of a smaller competitors playbook Nutanix. Nutanix if you  remember announced that they would be supporting HPE servers, cisco servers without the blessing of HPE and cisco directly. So what does that mean?

It means that you have to support or you have to trust that Microsoft and in Nutanix. In Nutanix case Nutanix fully and supporting a what’s a Sicily essentially an x86 based workload vSphere should work on just about any approved x86 platform so if the industry is right and Azure is running a bunch of HPE proliant servers in their data center there shouldn’t be a whole lot of difference in supporting vSphere inside of Azure data center or Microsoft data center than what Rackspace does inside Rackspace data center. The big difference however is integration VMware and AWS did a awful lot of work to get VMware vSphere to run inside an AWS data center and this is not an easy feat.

VMware uses a completely different networking completely different networking stat than AWS and both Azure so Microsoft had to kind of go at it shoehorning this alone.  I expect big announcements from VMware and AWS partnership next week and the type of innovation and integration that really doesn’t really happen when you go at it alone and don’t partner with other vendors. So what does this mean? I think essentially when looked at the blog post from Microsoft this was about migration this definitely wasn’t about taking your vSphere infrastructure and run long term inside of Azure this was a step towards migrating your workloads from vSphere to Azure you sitting your workload close to your Azure infrastructure and you can easily move from one platform to another via high speed network.

This isn’t a long term play therefore if your looking for a AWS vSphere type integration in Azure I wouldn’t look that far haven’t gotten enough details where one win and one loses but basically this isn’t a long term play. Now back to the Nutanix thing should you trust HPE Cisco hardware with a relationship with Nutanix that isn’t a proper OEM support model. You know what it depends on the workload and your tolerance for risks. A lot of organizations want heavy duty non stop support they want these relationships that they have either “one <throat to choke>” is the term or they have A tight partnership where they call any vendor they get equal levels of support no matter which vendor they call.

If you’re that type of organization you should probably stay away from these types of deals but if you’re an organization that you like you know what we have skill we have differentiating infrastructure team support that can go in and really troubleshoot x86 down to you know what there’s not enough thermal paste on the x86 core processor and we need support. That you know what maybe you a little safer and going with one of these unsupported hybrid modes.

That’s it for today daily dose. I am looking forward to AWS reinvent. If there’s something you want to see special from the coverage we will be having sponsored podcast from Druva Inc, Datos IO, Cohesity Inc. If you noticed there’s a theme there around data protection companies. If there’s  another company you would like to see me interview outside of the cube or outside these sponsor post on the CTO advisor daily dose. Let me know on Twitter @ctoadvisor on Twitter and you can look me up on LinkedIn the blog is thectoadvisor.com. Talk to you next