Bring Azure to your VMware environment: Announcing GA of VMware vSphere enabled by Azure Arc

Empowering the digital evolution requires seamless integration, agility, and scalability. By extending Azure services to the customer’s preferred environments like VMware, we want to ensure a consistent experience and help unlock the potential of limitless innovation.

Today we’re excited to deliver on that promise and thrilled to announce that VMware vSphere enabled by Azure Arc is now generally available to manage VMware resources in Azure.

With VMware vSphere enabled by Azure Arc, you can:

• Enable Azure services at scale for your entire VMware estate – on-premises, AVS and multicloud
• Enable self-service access and management to VMware resources for developers and end users

Enable Azure services at scale

Customers can discover their entire VMware estate, install Azure Arc agents at scale directly from Azure, and easily onboard their VMware machines to Azure management services. Customers can use services like Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Azure Monitor, Azure Update Manager, and more to enhance the security, monitoring, and governance of your VMware machines. Customers can also enable Extended Security Updates on all Windows Server 2012/R2 and SQL Server 2012 machines running on VMware vSphere, ensuring that end-of-life workloads are protected.

Under vCenter inventory view, select all the VMs and click on enable guest management to install Arc agents at scale.

Create an Extended Security License and apply to eligible machines to get ESUs.

Enable self-service access and management to VMware resources for developers and end users

IT administrators can use Azure RBAC to set up self-serve access to VMware resources for developers and end users. End users can provision virtual machines with ease on VMware vSphere using Azure portal, ARM and bicep templates. They can perform virtual hardware operations like start, stop, restart, resize, add and manage disks on VMware machines from Azure.  

 Getting started:

To get started with VMware vSphere enabled by Azure Arc, check out our [documentation] and watch this [video by John Savill].

There aren’t any additional charges to connect your VMware vSphere resources in Azure by enabling them with Azure Arc. Azure Arc provides select inventory and VM provisioning capabilities for free. There are charges for additional Azure services like security, management, data services, observability, and more. Learn more on the Azure Arc pricing page

We look forward to hearing your feedback!

Write to us at [email protected].

Azure Arc: https://aka.ms/arc

vSphere Jumpstart scenario: aka.ms/arc-vsphere-jumpstart 

YouTube video by John Savill: Azure Arc enabled VMware vSphere walkthrough