Azure VMware Solution: When Lift-and-Shift Actually Makes Sense

“Lift-and-shift” gets a bad rap. The cloud-native crowd treats it like a failure of imagination, and sometimes it is. But I work with organisations running real VMware estates — and for a lot of them, the honest answer is that re-platforming hundreds of workloads is a multi-year project nobody asked for.

Azure VMware Solution (AVS) is the pragmatic middle. Your vSphere environment, running on dedicated bare-metal in Azure, managed the way your team already knows.

When AVS is the right call

• Hard deadlines. Data-centre exits and lease expiries don’t wait for a re-architecture.
• Workloads that resist refactoring. Appliances, legacy apps, anything with a vendor support matrix that says “VMware only.”
• Teams with deep vSphere muscle. Keep the operational model; change the location.

The bit people underestimate: networking

AVS lives or dies on the networking design. Get the connectivity wrong and everything downstream is painful.

ExpressRoute, the right hub-and-spoke topology, and a firewall strategy that treats AVS as just another spoke — that’s where I spend most of my design time. Once the plumbing is right, AVS stops feeling like a compromise and starts feeling like what it is: a calm, deliberate way to get into Azure without setting fire to what already works.