- Coming up on a special edition of Microsoft Mechanics,
we look at how you can run your VMware workloads
natively on Azure with the new Azure VMware Solution,
which is now generally available.
And to explain more, I'm joined today by Matt McSpirit,
who's no stranger to Microsoft Mechanics.
Welcome back to the show.
- Thanks, Jeremy, it's great to be back.
- So why don't we get right into this?
Because we've had the ability to migrate VMware environments
to Azure for a while now, but what's different now
with the new Azure VMware Solution?
- So the new Azure VMware Solution, or AVS,
is a fully-managed Microsoft first-party Azure PaaS service
that lets you run your VMware environment natively in Azure,
essentially VMware in the cloud,
using your existing investments
in the VMware ecosystem of tools and processes.
It's just VMware as you know it and it's endorsed by VMware.
- Okay, so why don't we drill into the details?
What's new about the new iteration of this?
- So for starters, this is
an entirely Microsoft developed and supported solution
that has deep native integration with Azure.
And, of course, we'll take care of managing
and updating your environment so that you can focus
on running your VMware workloads.
And what's also great is you can use this solution
on your terms, either being completely in the cloud
or in a hybrid configuration combined with on-prem VMware.
Now, the best part is you can integrate
your VMware workloads with native Azure services,
like for example, using Azure Blob Storage
for storing things like VM templates.
- And this is really a good use case,
because you won't be using your premium storage and VSAN
for objects that can be stored in lower tier storage
at lower cost.
And it's unlimited in Azure,
so I can see lots of scenarios
that would really open up here.
It'd be useful, for example,
if you wanted to add capacity in the cloud
to avoid hardware refresh costs.
Maybe you want to increase your seasonal capacity,
or even replicate your policies and VMs in Azure
as part of your disaster recovery
or business continuity strategies.
And it also helps, as more and more of us
are working remotely today.
But how would I get started?
- So, in most cases, you probably already have
an existing VMware environment.
So, for example, here I've got
a pretty typical vSphere environment,
and let's assume that this is my on-prem VMware.
This is my starting point,
and I want to move either parts or all of it into Azure.
- Okay, so everyone's vSphere environment
I think's a bit unique,
but how do I know then how to right size that environment
when I bring it into Azure?
- Great question.
Now to make it easy, we've expanded Azure Migrate
to now also include support for Azure VMware Solution.
Now to find this, I'm just going to start
by searching for Migrate, and there it is,
and I'll select the Azure Migrate option.
Now this feature is currently in public preview
and includes both the discovery and assessment phase.
Discovery's used to import your server inventory
and assessments are essentially what will output
the required sizing.
So I'll click into servers and discover.
And when you start a discovery,
you can either use the appliance VM method
for an accurate performance-based assessment
of your existing VMware environment,
or you can simply upload your VMware inventory
with basic VM information from a CSV file.
Now here's a CSV file,
and you'll see some pretty standard VM specs
and performance metrics that we'll use
to calculate the assessment.
Now, I already have one assessment that I created earlier
and you'll see that in this case,
I need four nodes for the 12 VMs in my assessment.
Now, assessments can represent either a single application
or workload or your entire VMware estate.
And here, I'm just assessing a single app
with just a few VMs.
Now, if I click into edit properties,
I can adjust the VMware and Azure specific settings,
such as storage policy settings and/or CPU over subscription
in addition to choosing the right location and node size.
But once I feel good about the recommendations
and my inputs, I can click back into my assessment,
and here we have a link straight to the AVS service
to create a new private cloud.
- How easy is it then to create
a new private cloud in Azure?
- So, the experience is similar
to provisioning other Azure services in the portal.
As you can see here, the link has taken me
straight to the private cloud create blade
in the Azure Portal.
So I'll fill in the standard Azure Resource Manager fields,
as well as specify the credentials needed
for the vCenter environment
and some network specific settings.
- So, how long does the provisioning
or build process then take?
- Well, that's going to take about an hour, but compare that
to setting up your VMware environment on premises
where it could take weeks to install everything needed.
Now to save time, let's move on to one I set up earlier.
So let me show you a fully provisioned vSphere environment
in Azure and how closely we've integrated with Azure.
I can easily manage my connectivity settings,
such as my network config from on-prem via ExpressRoute,
or grab my HCX required configuration
for configuring and activating the HCX service
that we'll use for VM Migration later.
In Identity, I can get the link to my vCenter
NSX Manager and passwords.
And for managing additional capacity in my Clusters,
I can simply edit the sizing here in the Azure Portal.
I can see the number of nodes that I have
and choose to edit the number of ESXi hosts
with a simple slider, but I'm going to
keep it at four for now.
And also, to support disaster recovery, or DR,
we now have a new add-on blade, which enables you
to deploy the VMware Site Recovery Manager Appliance
straight from the Portal,
and we'll have other add-on offerings showing up soon.
Additionally, we've also built support
for AVS via the Azure CLI using the VMware extension.
So, I'm in my jump box now,
where I'll run this CLI command for Clusters with a -H,
and as you can see, we can easily
and programmatically configure or add nodes to our cluster.
Now remember the Azure Blob Storage we talked about earlier?
I can see reference to that in my content library
here in vSphere.
So I'll hop into my content library settings,
and instead of an internal data store
you'll see the subscription URL
is actually pointing to an Azure Blob resource.
And if we go back to the Azure Portal,
I could show you the Azure Blob Storage objects
in that resource.
In this case, you could see my VM templates
in my Azure Blob Store, and this can be accessible
to all my VMware private clouds if I choose.
- Okay, so if I wanted then to migrate some VM workloads
into the new Azure hosted vSphere environment,
what does that process look like?
- Right, so let's migrate a VM
from my on prem environment to Azure using HCX.
So, HCX is deployed as part of the AVS private cloud
and is the standard tool used
for VMware to VMware Migrations,
supporting the many scenarios you might have.
Now, in my case, I've got two sites set up
as you can see in this view of the site connections.
- Right, so now you can move one or more of those VMs then
between each site like we just saw on the map.
- Yeah, that's right.
So let me show you how simple it is.
So now, we're going to perform a VM Migration using HCX,
and in this demo, I've configured
all the HCX connections in advance.
Here in the vSphere Client
you can see the source virtual machine,
so I'll just right click and choose HCX Actions
and select migrate to target site.
I'm going to select the required configuration options
for my target destination,
like my compute container, migration type,
which could be single or bulk migration,
and my destination storage.
And then, I'll click on go.
Of course, for large scale migrations,
we can migrate several VMs at a time,
and even application groups.
And HCX can also serve as a manual DR function.
So we'll take a look at our Migration monitor,
and we've sped things up a little bit to save some time,
but you can see that our VM is now migrated
into our AVS target site.
- Okay, so now that you're an Azure,
then what can I do or what do I need to do
if I want to connect to other Azure services?
- Well, now that you've got your workloads in Azure,
you can connect your VMware workloads
to the entire Azure ecosystem with its deep integration.
You can leverage our partner ecosystem with support
for things like backup and business continuity solutions
from partners like Veeam, Veritas, and Commvault.
- Where is Azure VMware Solution available today?
- So the service is currently available
in the US, Europe, Australia,
and other regions, including Japan, Canada, UK,
and Southeast Asia are coming soon.
And you can learn more about our solution at aka.ms/getAVS,
and find everything you need to get started
with building your vSphere private cloud in Azure today.
- Thanks, Matt.
And hopefully we answered all of your questions.
And don't forget to subscribe to Microsoft Mechanics
for the latest tech updates.
Thanks for watching.
We'll see you next time.
(digital beeping) (peppy electronic music)