After the recent news around VMC on AWS and that AWS is no longer allowed to resell VMware licenses directly, a lot of customers and community folks were expecting actions to be taken for the other hyperscaler solutions. Yesterday, Microsoft announced that they have worked together with Broadcom to allow customers to take their existing / already purchased VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) licenses and use them in the Azure Cloud with the AVS offering.

Microsoft is handling the licensing for AVS customers since 2019 and with the new capability, that enables customrs to consume already purchased licenses for VCF to consume the AVS service by only paying for the actual hardware costs. The remaining way of purchasing the licenses through a partner or through the marketplace directly will still remain.

This will give customers now two possibilities on how to consume the service:

• Purchase AVS through the Azure marketplace (we will cover this in the next blog post).
• Purchase VCF through Broadcom or a reseller and use these licenses in Azure and back on-premises if needed.

The following video explains the advantages of AVS: