VMware refuses to support its wares running in Azure

Who is Microsoft's mystery partner? We think it's a hyperconverged player

VMware has responded to Microsoft's plan to run its stack in Azure, by saying customers who choose that option will have to forego support.

“This offering has been developed independent of VMware, and is neither certified nor supported by VMware,” wrote Virtzilla's senior veep for product development and cloud services Ajay Patel.” Patel added that no VMware partners have collaborated with the company to build Microsoft's offering.

VMware's reason for denying support was explained on the basis that standing up a VMware-based cloud service needs a lot of careful work one does not simply walk into Mordor.

“Our experience has shown public cloud environments require significant joint engineering to run enterprise workloads,” Patel wrote, later charactering VMware-on-AWS as a “a jointly architected, and fully tested and validated cloud service”

“Hence, we cannot endorse an unsupported and non-engineered solution that isn’t optimized for the VMware stack. VMware does not recommend and will not support customers running on the Azure announced partner offering.”

Patel also took a swipe at Microsoft, as follows:

Microsoft recognizing the leadership position of VMware’s offering and exploring support for VMware on Azure as a superior and necessary solution for customers over Hyper-V or native Azure Stack environments is understandable but, we do not believe this approach will offer customers a good solution to their hybrid or multi-cloud future.

Who is Microsoft's partner?

Denying support is a simple tactic that will give VMware customers pause … unless Microsoft's mystery partner can satisfy users they can take excellent care of vSphere and other Virtzilla wares.

That familiarity is a requirement for any hyperconverged infrastructure company that offers vSphere as an option.

Such companies are also increasingly keen on supporting multiple hypervisors. They also like software-only implementations that run in public clouds, as a way of delivering hybrid clouds.

The Register's virtualization desk can therefore imagine that Microsoft's VMware-on-Azure service is really a multi-hypervisor hyperconverged stack running on Azure tin.

If that's the case it would explain why VMware hasn't been approached for any engineering work: a hyperconverged company has already done that work with VMware. The current effort could focus more on getting their stack running in Azure.

Microsoft sources tell us the partner can be considered a startup, or to have recently shed startup status. Just about the entire hyperconverged industry fits that description.

The hyperconverged industry's leading light, Nutanix, has also in the past shown a willingness to support Virtzilla's wares. It also likes to rattle VMware's cage for fun and profit.

If you've a more-informed guess to offer, feel free to let me know or leave a comment.

We may not all have long to wait: The Register understands that Microsoft may reveal the identity of its VMware partner next week, that news of other cloudy mashups is imminent and that Redmond is mindful of not letting Amazon Web Services have things all its own way during the week of its re:invent conference. ®