Boost VMware Migration and Modernization with AI-powered Azure factory

Broadcom's acquisition of VMware in many ways brought simplification and consolidation. It also led clients to face decisions on how to approach their on-premises architecture and the corresponding investments.  

Clients are recomputing their total cost of ownership (TCO) of their workloads and exploring different pathways and destinations for their IT estate which might lead to different modernization approaches. 

IBM® helps clients to analyze these different approaches which can include staying and optimizing on VMware or choosing alternatives like working with Microsoft. In fact, IBM Consulting® teams have been working closely with Microsoft to help clients find the best paths to optimizing TCO, enabling cloud transformations and organizational growth.

Microsoft Azure provides multiple options for VMware clients who want to modernize their workloads from on-premises to the cloud. Here’s the quick view of the options available to clients:

Clients who are facing situations such as near-term data center lease expiry, upcoming hardware refresh and VMware renewal might consider a migration approach to move their workload from datacenter to the cloud before the due date.

The benefits of a migration approach include:

1. Fully automated rapid migration with speed.
2. Lift and shift migration which ensures application migrated as-is without changes.
3. Minimal or zero downtime during the migration.
4. Lower cost of migration compared to modernization.

As part of the migration approach Microsoft Azure provides the following options:

Azure VMware Solution (AVS): Clients can migrate their VMware workloads rapidly to AVS using VMware HCX™ and benefit from Azure’s price locks that are available for 1, 3 and 5-year commitments. On top of the hybrid benefits for Windows and SQL servers which are under software assurance, AVS provides extended security updates for windows 2012 workloads. The clients get compelling Azure credit, competitive VMware pricing and Broadcom licensing portability options while migrating the workloads to AVS.

Azure Virtual Machines (VM): While AVSs give option to migrate existing workloads as-is. Azure native VMs helps clients to move to a wide range of operating systems and provides certified VMs for enterprise workloads such as SAP, Oracle and other enterprise applications. Clients can save by using hybrid benefits, reserved instances, spot pricing and security updates.

For more details on how to migrate the windows and SQL workloads to Azure, please refer to our IBM Consulting Global Windows & SQL Server Migration to Azure - Marketplace offering.

Clients who are already took the migration approach and are looking to modernize their applications to get maximum benefits out of cloud native architecture might look into to a modernize now approach:

The benefits of focusing on modernization include:

• Fully managed Azure cloud native services abstract underlying infrastructure and operating system.
• Increased developers productivity and helps developers to fully focus on building innovative modern applications.
• Results in a higher ROI for your cloud transformation expenditure.

VMware clients who have already renewed their existing licenses in the subscription model or migrated their workloads by using migrate first approach can use the following modernization pathways.

Azure provides various the services to migrate applications and databases to fully managed services. It provides various options to migrate the databases to full managed databases such as managed SQL, PostgreSQL, MySQL and Oracle Dabase@Azure. Clients have the options to migrate their Java™, .net, Python, Node. Js applications to Azure webapps. Azure DevOps provides end-to-end tools to innovate faster, and ship the incremental workloads to production smarter.

IBM Consulting helps clients follow a ‘container first approach’ to make their application landscape portable, open, lightweight and avoid vendor lock-ins in the future. Existing applications in JBoss, Tomcat, WebSphere and other platforms can be containerized and moved to Azure Kubernetes Services and Azure Red Hat OpenShift. This move is to improve developer productivity, and build resilient applications which can be managed and monitored much more easily.

1.    VMware Modernization Assessment

Through our VMware Modernization Assessment, we conduct a thorough analysis of your VMware estate and provide alternative pathways to migrate the workloads safely and securely with no business disruption.

Our analysis considers the existing expenditure on-premises, hardware and software lifecycle, the cost to migrate to the target platform, the benefits of the target platform, and the net year-on-year savings. The analysis also provides an in-depth cost-benefit analysis to help you build a business case for cloud transformation.

2.    Specialized Azure Factory powered by assets and assistants

IBM Consulting has a specialized Azure Factory powered by Microsoft AI-infused assets and assistants which help accelerate the movement by using an automation-first and AI-first culture that uses Microsoft generative AI capabilities in every migration step.

IBM augments and empowers its migration engineers, architects and testers at every migration touch point with generative AI-based assistants. The approach of Factory with assets and assistants was jointly developed along with Microsoft on Azure AI. Our tools approach is built on the IBM Consulting Advantage, allowing easy, customized access to proprietary methods, purpose-built AI assets and models, and role-based generative AI assistants.

3.    Differentiated delivery to de-risk migration

Our differentiated delivery approach to Azure helps to identify the risks and barriers early and mitigate them.

Differentiators of IBM Azure Migration Factory are:

• The Factory with assets and assistants offers a 20% reduction in risk and 25% faster delivery through a repeatable and codified approach through IBM Consulting Cloud Accelerator (ICCA).
• Our AI first approach helps clients to identify the barriers well in advance and remove the risks proactively. Our AI tools offer deeper insights into the existing application landscape and reduce the human touchpoints.
• T-shirt-based pricing, bounded by complexity definition at the unit level, helps clients to align their budget with the workload volume they want to migrate.
• IBM's incumbency with large number of clients across the world and understanding of underlying industry process and application helps accelerate migration to Azure faster.
• Our acquisitions, such as Nuedesic and Nordcloud, provide reach to other market segments, countries and languages.
• We use experiential squads for Azure migration supported by unique assets, accelerators and tools from IBM and acquisitions.
• Our onshore, Offshore and Nearshore model supports anytime, anywhere delivery model to meet local compliancy and regulations.

The IBM Consulting and Microsoft partnership is grounded in a shared vision, with all of IBM's hybrid cloud and AI strategy integrated with the entire Microsoft cloud for the benefit of our clients. Through our dedicated IBM Consulting Microsoft practice, we have co-funded and co-developed critical solutions with Microsoft. We have invested in training our consultants on Microsoft Cloud while expanding our bench of experts and capabilities through acquisitions like Neudesic.

We have 40,000+ hybrid cloud consultants and experts globally, 26000+ Azure certifications, process and Technology experts augmented by the acquisition of NordCloud, Taos and Neudesic, and 30+ years of alliance with Microsoft.

To know more about our migration offering, methodology and benefits, please visit IBM Azure Migration Services.

Explore IBM Consulting & Microsoft Case Studies

Explore VMware modernization Assessment

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