Replatform VMware and Azure VMware Solution applications

Many datacenters depend on hypervisors like VMware to provide a flexible IT infrastructure that virtualizes physical resources and simplifies operations. However, as organizations plan their transition from on-premises datacenters to the cloud, they often face challenges tied to their substantial VMware investments—infrastructure, expertise, and subscription commitments. Simultaneously, they must navigate aging facilities, escalating capacity demands, evolving security threats, and tightening budgets.

Azure offers a compelling path forward. With Azure, you can preserve your existing VMware investments while gaining the benefits of cloud innovation—including cost optimization, global scalability, and access to advanced data and AI capabilities. Azure VMware Solution enables a fast, low-risk migration of VMware workloads to Azure. It allows you to modernize your infrastructure while maintaining continuity with your existing tools, processes, and skillsets. This minimizes disruption and eliminates the need for expensive refactoring, letting your IT teams continue using familiar VMware tools while gradually building cloud competencies.

For organizations ready to adopt a more Azure-centric approach, Azure Virtual Machines offer an alternative path by moving VMware virtual machines directly to Azure IaaS. This model provides more flexibility and integration with Azure's native management and security capabilities. To further accelerate innovation and reduce operational complexity, some organizations choose to replatform their applications using Azure Platform as a Service (PaaS). This unlocks enhanced scalability, built-in high availability, autoscaling, and faster development cycles—ideal for teams looking to modernize through containerization or microservices architecture.

Getting started

Replatforming is an opportunity to address performance, security, and scalability. Make sure to consider both your applications and data in your plans.

Assess the following:

• Application compatibility. Before moving to PaaS, do a thorough assessment to ensure support for programming languages, frameworks, and any other dependencies.
• Data migration. Make sure your plans account for the replatforming of data onto Azure. Consider using Azure Blob Storage or Azure SQL Database.

Choosing an Azure service

In many scenarios, we recommend replatforming VMware and Azure VMware Solution applications using either Azure App Service or Azure Kubernetes Service.

Choose Azure App Service for:

• Web apps, APIs, and mobile backends that require a fully managed platform for building, deploying, and scaling applications.
• Simpler applications that do not require complex orchestration or customization.

Choose Azure Kubernetes Service for:

• Containerized applications that require a managed Kubernetes service.
• More complex applications and microservices architectures that demand greater flexibility and control.

This decision is one of the key steps during the Foundation stage. For details, see Azure App Service, Azure Container Apps, and Azure Kubernetes Service.

Next steps

Get started on the next cycle of activities and expand and optimize application modernization.