Considering a Shift from VMware to Azure: Experiences and Insights?

If you’re just doing a lift and shift, expect your costs to rise. The cloud usually ends up being more expensive, especially with a direct one-to-one migration. It's better to consider replatforming rather than a straight lift-and-shift.

I've made a few migrations from on-prem VMware to Azure, and honestly, the performance isn't great. If cost is a concern, going to something like Hyper-V or Proxmox instead of Azure could save you a lot in operational expenses.

Most folks end up going hybrid instead of a full cloud migration. Not every application is suitable for Azure; legacy and latency-sensitive apps usually need to stay on-prem. Consider your needs carefully before making the leap. If you have to maintain Active Directory, be prepared to host at least some of your infrastructure in Azure for proper integration.

There are tools available that can help you estimate costs for migrating to Azure—definitely check out the Azure migration tool. We recently opted for an in-house Hyper-V setup after refreshing our hardware, and it turned out to be more cost-effective than going fully cloud-based, which would have cost us about 2-3 times more over five years.

We moved away from VMware to Azure, and overall it worked well for us since we didn't have many servers. Our on-prem hardware costs were actually higher than the Azure expenses. It was a smooth transition, but I underestimated backup costs before starting.