Decision guide
VMware exit decision guide
A structured way to decide what happens to your VMware estate before the renewal. Work through it with your team, and you will know what you still need to find out.
1. Know your dates
- When does your current VMware agreement end?
- Do you have a renewal quote, and what does it include?
- Which hardware is due for refresh in the next three years?
- Are any data centre, hosting or DR contracts ending in the same period?
2. Know your estate
- An inventory of every VM, with its owner and what it does
- Measured CPU, memory and storage use, not only what is allocated
- Dependencies between systems, from network flow data rather than memory
- Constraints: latency, data residency, vendor support conditions, and plant or site systems
Read the rest of this decision guide
Enter your work details to unlock this and every other guide on the site. We'll also send you a note in case you want to talk it through with an engineer.
3. Place each workload
- Public Azure: general-purpose servers, burst workloads and systems that benefit from platform services
- Azure Local: systems that must stay on site or close to users and equipment
- Azure VMware Solution: a bridge for a defined period, when a workload can't be rebuilt in time
- Another hypervisor: where a specific constraint makes it the better answer
- Retire: systems nobody uses or can justify
4. Compare costs properly
- Licensing for each option, including Windows Server and SQL Server
- Hardware for Azure Local, with room for a node to be out for maintenance
- Azure consumption, sized from measured use
- The cost of running two platforms during the migration
- Operations: backup, monitoring, patching and the skills to run each platform
5. Check your team and operations
- Who will run Azure and Azure Local day to day, and do they have the skills?
- Are identity, DNS and networking ready for a hybrid platform?
- Will backup and DR work on the new platforms from the first migrated workload?
- Can application owners test each migration wave, and when are they available?
6. Sequence the work
- Build the landing zone and any Azure Local clusters before the first workload moves.
- Run a pilot wave with low-risk workloads to prove the method.
- Migrate in waves that keep dependent systems together, each with a rollback path.
- Retire VMware hosts as waves finish, to reduce what the renewal needs to cover.
Signs you need help
- The renewal is within a year and there is no inventory yet
- Nobody can say with confidence which systems depend on which
- Azure Local hardware hasn't been specified and lead times are unknown
- The team that would run the new platform is already fully committed
Next step
This guide supports VMware exit and Azure Local. Talk to an engineer if you want it worked through for your environment.
Start a conversation
Get the decision made while there is time to act on it.
Talk to an engineer about your VMware renewal.
Talk to an Engineer