Native VMware Integration Announced in Azure

As part of an expanded partnership, Dell and Microsoft plan to offer VMware workloads on Microsoft Azure in the future. With Azure VMware Solution, customers will be able to seamlessly migrate and run their existing VMware environments in Azure, including integration of VMware vSphere, vSAN, or vCenter. The partnership not only includes the native deployment of VMware environments in Azure datacenters, for example for disaster recovery scenarios or the outsourcing of datacenters to the cloud, but also integration into advanced Azure services such as Azure Active Directory, Azure AI or Azure IoT.

Dell and Microsoft are not limiting their new collaboration to just providing the virtual workload in Azure. The companies have also announced that VMware Workspace ONE will become a member of the Microsoft 365 environment and manage Office 365 as part of the Microsoft Enterprise Mobility and Security Suite (EMS). VMware Workspace ONE will be updated to integrate the APIs provided by Intune and thus also provide information on device status and state data for conditional access. By the end of 2019, both companies will publish a preview of Windows Virtual Desktop that has been enhanced with VMware VDI capabilities. What this collaboration could look like, however, was not specified in detail.