Beyond the Cloud: Hardware Considerations - Part III
Your VMware exit hardware strategy determines both timeline and budget. Windows Server offers maximum flexibility with existing infrastructure, Azure Local requires validated nodes costing $200K-500K+, and VMware VCF 9.0 deprecates older hardware anyway. This analysis provides a framework for making hardware decisions that fit your organization's timeline and budget constraints.
(Note: AVS – Azure VMware Solution – is not covered in detail here since it’s essentially outsourcing VMware onto Azure’s hardware. That involves a different calculus: you avoid buying hardware entirely, but you pay cloud rental fees and must fit into Azure’s instance constraints. In this post, we focus on on-premises alternatives where you control the hardware.)
Hardware Considerations: Build Your Cloud on Your Terms Series Recap: In Part 1 of this series, we examined the total cost of ownership (TCO) implications of different post-VMware paths, comparing capital expenditure vs.