Microsoft may well have grand plans to run the VMware stack in Azure, but the virtualisation company isn’t playing ball.
In a blog post by VMware’s SVP of product development, cloud services, Ajay Patel said: “This offering has been developed independent of VMware, and is neither certified nor supported by VMware.”
Patel also highlights that none of VMware’s certified partners have collaborated with the virtualisation company with regards to engineering the solution.
Although the move from Microsoft could be seen as one to effectively take customers away from VMware, the subject of Microsoft’s desire is having none of it. VMware isn’t pointing to competition as a reason for not supporting the offering but due to technical challenges.
“Our experience has shown public cloud environments require significant joint engineering to run enterprise workloads. Hence, we cannot endorse an unsupported and non-engineered solution that isn’t optimized for the VMware stack. VMware does not recommend and will not support customers running on the Azure announced partner offering,” said Patel.
Whilst Microsoft played up the cost saving potential of migrating VMware applications to, saying that there could be up to 84% TCO savings for “certain on-premises VMWare to Azure migration scenarios,” the virtualisation company isn’t convinced that it’s enough to get customers moving.
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Patel said that there is a “clear move by enterprise customers to standardize on VMware as the platform that provides both common infrastructure and operations across multiple clouds.” The company wants to assure customers that it’s the only one that can make sure its vSphere and other products run smoothly on other clouds.
Which is why it partnered with AWS for the VMware Cloud on AWS, a co-developed offering, “that is fully supported and managed by VMware engineers.”
There’s no idea yet as to how customers will react to the news that VMware won’t be having anything to do with the Microsoft offering, and currently that service from the Redmond company is only in preview, so it may not go ahead with it if customers are scared off by VMware’s current refusal to support it.
