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VMware Widens Availability of Microsoft Azure Service

• By Scott Bekker
• 08/26/2019

VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger described plans to expand the VMware-Microsoft cloud offering during his VMworld 2019 keynote on Monday.

The service, dubbed Azure VMware Solutions, allows organizations to run VMware workloads natively on Microsoft Azure. As Microsoft indicated at the product's late-April launch, it allows customers to run, manage and secure applications across VMware environments and Azure with a common operating framework. Supported VMware technologies include VMware vSphere, vSAN, NSX and vCenter.

The offering was initially available in just two Azure regions -- U.S East and U.S. West. On Monday, Gelsinger said the offering is also available in a third Azure region, the West Europe region, with further global expansion coming soon.

"By the end of the year, we'll be in Australia and Southeast Asia," Gelsinger said.

According to a graphic displayed behind Gelsinger, the footprint of the partnership will also broaden within some existing geographies before the end of this year. The offering should be up and running in Microsoft's Azure regions in Northern Europe, U.S, West 2 and South Central, which is also in the United States.

The graphic also showed that by the end of the first quarter of 2020, the offering will be added to Azure regions in Canada and Japan. That will bring availability of the VMware offering to 10 of Microsoft's 54 announced Azure regions.

The joint solution has attracted a few major customers. "Customers are already launching into this platform today. Over 20 customers are on it," said Gelsinger, naming Lucky Brands, Dot Foods and Gap.