Microsoft will continue to support its long-standing Azure VMware Solutions service, becoming the latest hyperscaler to throw its support behind VMware’s new operating model following recent moves by new parent company Broadcom.

“I am excited to continue this partnership with VMware by Broadcom,” Brett Tanzer, VP of product management for Microsoft Azure, explained in a blog post. “Our shared commitment to delivering Azure VMware Solution to customers is as strong as ever. We are actively working together to continue supporting our common customers, regardless of where they are on their cloud journey.”

Azure VMware Solutions was announced in 2019 as a collaboration between Microsoft, VMware and former VMware parent company Dell Technologies. The hybrid-cloud partnership allows customers to run VMware’s software stack in Microsoft’s Azure public cloud.

It’s built on VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) – an integrated software stack with compute (vSphere), storage (vSAN) and network virtualization (NV) (NSX) that can be deployed on-premises as a private cloud or in public clouds. In this particular case it’s deployed in Azure.

Tanzer added that the hyperscaler plans to add new region support and features to the platform this year, such as its Azure Elastic Storage-Area Networking (SAN) service.

The Azure product is similar to one VMware launched with Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2016, which allows customers to run the same VMware software stack on-premises or in the AWS public cloud. The AWS-powered platform has been a critical success for VMware.

Google Cloud was added to the party in mid-2020.

Analysts have noted VMware’s work with public cloud hyperscalers like AWS, Azure and Google Cloud remains an important operating angle for the vendor.

“[VMware is] never going to go away. There’s always going to be a role for VMware virtualization technology,” Tracy Woo, senior analyst at Forrester Research, told SDxCentral in an interview last year. “But it’s not going to be necessarily playing this outsized revenue engine for VMware that it has before. The moves that VMware has tried to establish themselves in the world, where public cloud is the predominant player, haven’t been incredibly meaningful. They have been able to carve out small niche roles for themselves, but they haven’t necessarily been able to be factored in as a huge player there.”

Those huge players are increasingly the hyperscalers that continue to dominate the public cloud space and have a growing presence in the private cloud arena.

Flexera’s “State of the Cloud 2023” survey found Microsoft’s Azure Stack was the dominant private cloud technology being used by enterprises to run workloads. That was followed by AWS’ Outposts, Microsoft’s System Center and VMware’s vSphere/vCenter.

VMware has attempted to expand its influence into hybrid-cloud management using its Tanzu cloud-native platform, which helped push the vendor to a leadership position in that space according to Forrester’s ranking of hybrid-cloud management platforms.

Woo noted that VMware’s angle of being at the crux of hybrid-cloud management has indeed shown progress, but that could be impacted by hyperscalers increasing their focus on the private cloud space.

“If the hyperscalers start playing nice with each other and start really integrating and doing more than just quietly releasing these [on-premises platforms], VMware is dead in the water,” Woo said. “That’s [VMware’s] big play right now, and where they play probably the biggest role, the best complementary role among the public cloud providers, which is providing this level of visibility and seamless control as much as a cloud management tool can do.”

“This is something that VMware is able to do probably better than any other player out there right now.”

The Azure support comes on the heels of Google Cloud becoming the inaugural hyperscale partner providing VMware Cloud Foundation on Google Cloud VMware Engine. That announcement also included more changes from Broadcom to VMware’s software delivery models and licensing.

Google Cloud’s move highlighted it was the first hyperscaler to take on VMware’s new subscription-based software delivery model. This allows current VMware Cloud Foundation customers to transfer the remaining value of their existing subscription to Google Cloud VMware Engine or opt to buy access to a full-integrated Google Cloud VMware Engine environment with VMware Cloud Foundation software directly from the hyperscaler.

Bruce Kornfeld, who is currently chief marketing and product officer at StorMagic, but spent nine years at Dell (last as executive director of global alliances in 2012), explained to SDxCental in a recent interview that Broadcom’s VMware licensing changes are targeted at squeezing more revenue from larger enterprises at the expense of the small- and mid-sized market.

“Broadcom is very clear, and I gotta give them credit, they’re being very clear and very consistent on what’s important to them, and what’s important to them is the enterprise,” Kornfeld said. “They want big customers and they want to make as much money as they can from big customers all day long.”