Organizations are making strategic investments,
migrating their workloads from the data center to “always-on” cloud infrastructure delivered by
Microsoft Azure VMware Solution. Azure VMware Solution enables enterprises to
set up private clouds in Azure. This solution helps customers keep their
existing VMware investments, skills, and tools while taking advantage of scale,
automation, and agility to provision VMware workloads on global Azure
infrastructure.
Organizations are also dealing with a
distributed workforce that extends from campus headquarters to home offices.
Users expect a consistent experience from any location when they connect to
applications in the Azure cloud or in the data center. Many organizations rely
on legacy WAN architectures for connectivity between users, the data center,
and Azure VMware Solution. These networks are unreliable, costly, and complex
to manage, leading to poor user experience. Many employees working from home
rely on the best effort broadband Internet to access applications, and
productivity suffers when users can’t reach their applications. These networks
can become a major bottleneck in providing the best user experience when
migrating workloads and adopting Azure VMware Solution.
Removing barriers to cloud migration
VMware Software-Defined Wide Area Network
(SD-WAN) solution delivers secure, reliable, and efficient access between users,
Azure VMware Solution in the Azure
cloud and on-premises data centers. Enterprise IT can now accelerate migration
of workloads from data centers to Azure
VMware Solution and offer a consistent experience to users no matter their
location. Also, the solution offers multiple choices when connecting end-users
and the data center to their Azure VMware Solution instance. For example, apart
from ensuring reliable access for users, VMware SD-WAN provides flexible solutions
to carry HCX overlay traffic between on-premises data centers and Azure Cloud.
VMware SD-WAN solutions deliver operational
simplicity and dynamic remediation capabilities when the network experiences
packet loss, latency, and jitter. The solution prioritizes business critical application
traffic, thus providing a rich user experience. VMware SD-WAN solution provides
connectivity to the nearest point of presence to the Azure VMware Solution
instance by leveraging the Azure Virtual WAN hub location, with the objective
of providing a low-latency optimal path between the end-users and Azure VMware
Solution to avoid unwanted traffic hair-pinning.
VMware SD-WAN has been
integrated with the Native Azure Virtual WAN Hub (vWAN Hub) to provide a secure
and reliable connection for organizations as they need to access their
workloads and applications that now reside in Azure VMware Solution. Azure
Virtual WAN Hub provides connectivity between VMware SD-WAN, Azure VMware
Solution, and data centers.
Figure 1: Remote workers and branch sites connecting to Azure VMware Solution using Azure Virtual WAN Hub.
“By leveraging the joint solution from VMware SD-WAN with Virtual WAN and Microsoft Azure VMware Solution, organizations can offer a consistent and rich user experience for the distributed workforce while accelerating their pace of migrating workloads to the Azure Cloud.”
Dr. Reshmi Yandapalli, Principal Program Manager at Microsoft Corp.
VMware SD-WAN is also integrated with Azure
Route Servers. Azure Route Servers create BGP peering with the VMware SD-WAN
Edge. This is possible by deploying virtual edge or virtual edge clusters and
Router Servers in Azure Virtual Network (VNET). This option takes away the need
to manually configure and maintain route tables.
Figure 2: Connecting users and data center workloads to Azure VMware using Route Server with VMware SD-WAN.
When using the VMware
SD-WAN virtual edge that can be deployed from the Azure Marketplace, customers
benefit from end-to-end SD-WAN, simplified network design, and reduced
complexity.
VMware SD-WAN and Azure VMware Solution: A force multiplier
This combined solution from VMware and Microsoft enables
organizations — across all industries and around the globe — to gain
simple-to-deploy, secure, high-performance connectivity from branch office
locations to Microsoft Azure as an overlay without having to redesign their
networks. This simple, automated deployment method allows customers to scale
across thousands of branches easily and reach their goals of migrating to the
Azure cloud. VMware SD-WAN enables enterprises to support the migration to
Microsoft SaaS offerings, including Bing, Dynamics 365, Office 365, and Xbox,
and to use Azure VMware Solution to host their own applications with high
performance and reliability.
