(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. subscription models across on-premises Hyper-V, Azure Local (formerly Azure Stack HCI), and Azure VMware Solution (AVS). In Part 2, we dove into licensing – analyzing how VMware vSphere licensing stacks up against Microsoft’s offerings (Windows Server and Azure Local) in 2025, and what those licensing differences mean for choosing a virtualization platform. These earlier posts highlighted that organizations leaving VMware have viable Microsoft-based alternatives that can reduce costs and simplify licensing. Now, in Part 3, we turn to the infrastructure question: What are your hardware options when “rethinking virtualization” away from VMware? Can you reuse your existing servers and storage, or are you forced into buying new, validated hardware nodes? How do Microsoft’s two on-premises solutions – Windows Server Hyper-V with Failover Clustering (WSFC) and Azure Local – compare in terms of hardware requirements? We’ll explore scenarios for customers looking to leave VMware, whether they’re not ready for a hardware refresh or planning a refresh alongside the migration, and we’ll also briefly touch on upcoming VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 hardware needs.
