 Greetings, everyone. I'm Jeff Woolsey, Principal PM Manager, and today we're going to discuss Microsoft Solutions for VMware Migration. Let's take a look at the agenda, shall we? First, we're going to do some quick level setting. We're going to discuss the market landscape for Hybrid Cloud that is changing. We're going to discuss a variety of Microsoft solutions. With each solution, we will discuss the benefits, when to use, and how to migrate. Finally, I have a section with some of the most frequently asked questions that we're receiving. First, let's discuss change going on in the industry. Starting with this press release, in case you missed it, this press release came out in December 11th, 2023, so a lot of folks may have not seen this as it was the holiday season. I'm not going to read the entire article, but I want to quote a couple of passages. The press release starts with, over the past two years, VMware has been on a journey to simplify its portfolio and transition from a perpetual to a subscription model to better serve customers with continuous innovation, faster time to value, and predictable investments. It continues. Today, VMware by Broadcom has reached a new milestone with the announcement of the following, a dramatic simplification of our product portfolio that allows customers of all sizes to gain more value for their investments in VMware solutions. It continues by saying to a complete the transition of all VMware by Broadcom solutions to subscription licenses with the end of sale of perpetual licenses. Support and subscription renewals for perpetual offerings and hybrid purchase programs, credits begin today, effective dates will vary. Additionally, we're bringing your own subscription license, providing license portability to VMware validated hybrid Cloud Endpoints, running VMware Cloud Foundation. Now, this was December, and again, this is just a small portion of the announcement I urge you to read it directly from them. I don't want to misinterpret anything, trying to be as transparent as possible here. But that was December, and since then, there's been a vocal response. In this R's Technica article, two months later, it states that even VMware admits sweeping Broadcom changes are worrying customers. Now, these changes across the board are a shock to the system such as VMware has ended perpetual licensing. They only sell subscriptions now. The number of VMware products have been cut down, requiring customers to purchase more expensive bundles, instead of just purchasing the products they have previously. VMware licensing costs have gone up. On average, it appears that the price has gone up 3x, but in some cases, it's more. Industry analyst Forrester predicts that 20 percent of VMware customers will leave VMware. From a headcount perspective, two-thirds of VMware's 30,000 employees have been laid off. From a product perspective, products are being sold off such as end-user computing, while others have uncertain futures. From a partner perspective, the partner channel has also been greatly reduced. Now, these changes are worrying organizations, and we are seeing the effects. We are seeing a daily stream of requests just like these. Microsoft. Our organization is exploring alternatives to VMware. We want to understand the complete range of Microsoft solutions available. That's why we're here, and that's why I have this session. This has been driven by customers, this has been driven by market demand, and I'm not kidding, every single day, we are getting numerous, numerous escalations for customers that are asking this exact question. Now, before we go off and start jumping into products, I think it's actually really important we take a step back, and we better understand the reason and the goals behind this question. For example, what are you trying to achieve? Is it that you need to quickly exit a data center? For example, maybe you've lost the lease, maybe you want to retire it, I want to move my VMware somewhere else. Do you want to avoid a CapEx hardware investment? Some folks have realized, you know what? This hardware is old, it's ancient, it's insecure. Do I really want to spend millions of dollars on upgrading that hardware? Would I just prefer to exit the hardware and move this up into the cloud as another way? Do you want to move all apps and workloads to the cloud? Do you want to add cloud services? Do you want to move some apps and workloads to the cloud while keeping an on-premises footprint? Do you want to keep using familiar tools? And do you want to improve security and governance across your entire digital estate? Well, if you answered yes to some or all or some portion of these, we've got good news here. The good news is that Microsoft offers a range of solutions, and that's what we're here to discuss today. So let's talk about various Microsoft solutions, and I'm gonna walk through a number of them. Very good chance, you'll choose one or even two and mix and match, but let's get started. Let's start with the VMware to Azure VMware solution. Again, are you looking to quickly exit a data center? Are you looking for a minimal risk solution where your IT staff uses the same tools, the same processes they already know? Do you want to avoid a huge CapEx investment instead of upgrading old, insecure hardware and buying new hardware? Well, guess what? If you're looking at these scenarios and guess what, Azure VMware solution could absolutely be the right fit. With the Azure VMware solution, there are numerous benefits, consistency. AVS allows you to use the same VMware foundation in Azure as you use in your private data centers. This is a bare metal deployment of VMware running in Azure that provides a consistent operating model and can increase business agility and resiliency. You can migrate workloads from your on-premises environments, deploy new VMs, and consume Azure services from your private clouds with this easy integration with Azure services. It also allows you to modernize your VMware workloads with native Azure management, security, and services. Then there's the ease of migration. AVS is an easy way to extend and migrate existing VMware environments to run them natively on Azure. It ensures data center migrations can be accelerated and the benefits of the cloud can be realized sooner. You leverage your existing VMware investments. Keep in mind that you get to use your existing VMware investments, your existing skills and tools, including VMware vSphere, vSAN, vCenter. This ensures operational continuity when redeploying your vSphere-based applications to Azure. Managed infrastructure. So one of the awesome things about the Azure VMware solution is that it's completely Microsoft manages and maintains the bare metal, the bare metal private cloud infrastructure and software. So this allows you to focus on developing and running your workloads, as opposed to the hardware and the underlying VMware infrastructure. That's all managed for you by Microsoft. You get scalability and fast provisioning. AVS provides on-demand access to additional capacity when you consolidate, retire, or expand existing data centers. It offers scale, automation, and fast provisioning for your VMware workloads on global Azure infrastructure. Let's take a look. So for the customer trying to minimize change and take advantage of an organization IT's knowledge of VMware, you can use AVS. It could be a great fit. Number one, AVS is a first-party offering from Microsoft that enables you to bring your native VMware workloads to Azure. There is no VM conversion required. You're simply moving your on-premises VMware VMs to the Azure VMware solution that run those same VMs. Azure VMware solution is a full VMware SDDC stack. It includes ESXi, NSX, VSAN, and HCX, running on top of bare metal, dedicated Azure infrastructure. And you get access to VSphere, HCX, and NSXT. Those are enabled during the private cloud deployment process. With AVS, you use your existing VMware investments, your skills, your tools, including VMware, VSphere, VSAN, NSX, and VSenter. This ensures operational continuity when redeploying your VSphere-based applications to Azure. So what does that migration look like? Well, here's how you migrate your VMware VMs to the Azure VMware solution. Let's start on the left here with your existing VMware environment. Next, you need to create your Azure VMware environment. And again, look at that. It's using the same VSphere VMware hypervisor storage networking. Once you've created your Azure VMware environment, you simply move your VMs to Azure and start adding Azure services. And by moving, I mean you migrate with VMware tools like HCX. This is all using the VMware tool set. Now, once you've moved your VMs to Azure, you can start adding Azure services. From the app platform, you may wanna add Azure app services, functions, AKS, or Azure Batch. From the intelligent data platform, maybe you wanna add Azure SQL, Power BI, or Azure AI integration. The fact that your VMware VMs are in AVS eases the integration with Azure services. It's pretty awesome. Now, I just talked about this migration means you've gotta deploy a new AVS cloud in Azure. So guess what? Let me show you exactly how you do that. Here we go. To get started, I'm going through the process of creating a new Azure VMware solution, private cloud right here in the Azure portal, just like I would any other Azure service. I walk through the process of specifying the necessary information to have Azure create my private cloud in just a few easy steps. I specify the region. I specify the size I'd like to use. I specify the credentials for vCenter so that I can connect to that environment. I provide the information for networking, the NSXT manager password, and the address information that I'd like to use to bind the VMware private cloud virtual network into the Azure vNet. I start the review process and kick it off. And in a few minutes, Azure will have successfully created my private cloud. Now a little time has passed and now I can go tour the private cloud and manage its capabilities. I can do things like manage connectivity, the number of hosts. I can configure identity. I can see metrics. In connectivity, you can configure how this private cloud connects to Azure ExpressRoute, my public facing IPs. And I can also configure connectivity to VMware HCX which enables me for to live migrate. I can even configure add-ons like VMware site recovery manager that are included in the MAC package to provide business continuity and disaster recovery. Now that my private cloud is ready to go, I can start using it. And the first thing I wanna do is log into my vCenter environment right here from within my Azure dashboard. So you can see that by clicking on the link and providing my credentials to go into log into vCenter, I'll transition through the Azure Bastion host to the vCenter environment that I've been productive in for many years. Click on connect. And here I am in vCenter's familiar console and I can tour the storage environment and look at my vSAN configuration. I can go ahead and manage my networking connectivity including connectivity to NSXT manager which is available in every VMware private cloud installation. I can configure HCX which helps me move my VMs from region to region. I can also go ahead and configure my networking routes for content libraries. Here you'll see these content libraries which embody the practices and policies that we've been using in VMware and we've stored these in an Azure storage container so that these content policies are available around the globe. And you'll see as I go back to my Azure portal I can explore the storage container system and you'll find my content libraries right here where you see all these content libraries and any private clouds I created in Azure anywhere. So as you can see, the Azure VMware solution is a native Azure solution. You can quickly create this familiar VMware environment in Azure, integrate it with Azure storage and Azure services and manage it all using the same familiar tools. So that was deploying a new Azure VMware solution. So a number of key takeaways about pricing and licensing. So let's start by talking about the AVS pricing structure and some interesting benefits here in terms of economic value problem. AVS is a pay as you go Azure subscription that includes both the Azure and VMware licenses you need. You don't need to pay, you don't need to call up VMware, you don't, we handle it all. You simply use AVS and we handle all of the licensing for those. Along with the pay as you go you can also achieve greater savings by forecasting and reserving future usage needs or reserved instances. With a single upfront payment, you get a discounted rate that represents up to 72% compared to straight pay as you go. In addition to reserved instances we also offer the Azure hybrid benefit. It's a licensing benefit that helps you significantly reduce the costs of running your workloads in the clouds. It works by letting you use your on-premises software assurance-enabled Windows Server and SQL Server licenses on Azure. And now this benefit applies to Red Hat and SUSE Linux subscriptions too. When you combine reserved instances with the hybrid benefit you can save up to 80% compared as pay as you go licensing. That's right, 80%. And last but not least we also provide extended security benefits for existing Windows Server and SQL licenses being migrated to AVS. Bring your Windows Server and SQL Server 2012, 2012 R2, bring these workloads to Azure and you also get three years of extended security updates at no additional charge. Only upgrading to current version when you're ready. So when you think about all of these programs working in concert there's a very compelling economic value proposition for moving to AVS. Now you've been wondering this sounds really good, Jeff but tell me, what about customers using it? Well, we have lots of customers using it and this is just one from one of our public case studies. This is Dominique Renard, the director of information of system security at Soledale. He says, as a public institution we were very sensitive to the security implemented by Azure VMware solution in terms of data protection. Our data is hosted in the EU. On one hand there's protection for the container that hosts our data. On the other hand, transmission between Soledale and the Microsoft servers. There's really a portability between the VMware based Soledale virtual machines and the Azure cloud. It's a perfect match. So I hope you see this and realize that Azure VMware solution has a tremendous amount of upside. I hope you evaluate it. Now, I will say there are some customers that said, you know what, that's great but in some cases, customers have told us flat out. We actually wanna reduce our costs even further and we'd prefer to stop paying VMware licensing altogether. Cost is a driving factor. We're looking to lower the cost as much as possible. So here's a second option. That option of course is Azure VMs or infrastructure as a service. So by moving VMware VMs to Azure VMs there are numerous benefits and let's start with the big one, cost. There is a huge cost optimization involved. There's no VMware license. There is no, it is using native Azure cloud resources. Also, once you migrate your organization's infrastructure to an IAS solution, we can help you reduce maintenance of on-premises data centers, save money on hardware costs and gain real-time business insights. There's also scalability. Flexibility to scale your IT resources up and down with demand and only pay for the resources you use. The VM families are optimized for compute, memory and storage intensive workloads. In addition to AI, machine learning and mission critical scenarios, you can switch among VM types and sizes at any time. Of course, there's integration with Azure services. Azure IAS allows you to build infrastructure solutions with Azure IAS services and products. It provides compute, storage, networking, security and management services. From a security standpoint, Azure IAS helps protect your workloads and infrastructure with built-in security services and unparalleled intelligence. You also get extended security updates at no additional charge and you can take advantage of a really awesome feature, hot-patching Windows Server 2022 Azure Edition VMs. That's all included at no additional cost. You also get consistency across hybrid and multi-cloud. Azure IAS provides the consistency and flexibility to innovate anywhere across on-premises, multi-cloud and edge environments. We'll discuss this further in just a minute. So lower costs, incredible scalability, security and integration with Azure services are all compelling reasons to use Azure VMs. But what's the migration process from VMware to Azure VMs? Well, it's the standard tool that we use at Microsoft to migrate workloads to Azure. It's the Azure Migrate tool. Azure Migrate is a central hub for tools to discover, assess and migrate on-premises servers, applications and data to the Microsoft Azure Cloud. And of course you can use Azure Migrate to move your on-prem VMware VMs to Azure. It's really a three-step process. It starts with discovery, understanding what you have in terms of your vCenter, the number of servers, physical, virtual and discovering what you have in terms of your on-premises VMware environment. Then it moves to the assessment stage where you're assessing your Azure VMs, you have a discovery source which is an appliance-based, you deploy the Azure Migrate appliance, the appliance starts collecting configuration and analyzing performance of both Windows and Linux VMs as part of the discovery process. Next, it performs an assessment to determine Azure suitability, right-sizing information, Azure compute and storage cost estimates. We want you to be able to have all of the information ahead of time so you have a great idea of what the migration will entail, what the actual end result will look like and make sure you understand, you know, we wanna minimize risk at all which includes things like again, Azure suitability and right-sizing information. Now, you deploy and configure the Azure Migrate appliance for VMware and complete server discovery and you start replicating your Windows and Linux servers. Now, the Azure Migrate appliance actually orchestrates the replication of your VM data to your Azure subscription. During this process, it'll also perform test migrations. Now, these are optional but highly recommended. This goes to a sandbox environment with no impact to your production workloads and this way it helps you again validate your migration. Then finally, you migrate to Azure with zero data loss and minimal downtime. Now, again, I mentioned a lot of the benefits of the Azure VM solution, cost optimization, scalability, Azure, but I also mentioned something called hot patching and so I really, really actually wanna show you this because a lot of people haven't seen this yet and it's a critical cool feature that you get by taking advantage of Windows Server Azure edition on running on Azure. So hot patching is a new way to install updates that doesn't require a reboot and won't interrupt workloads running on your server. Now, before we start, let me describe the demo environment. I've chosen to use server core deployments of Windows Server because it provides a sharp contrast between a traditional update and a hot patch. On the right-hand side, I have a new Windows Server Core VM where I'm going to manually install hot patch updates. For comparison, on the left-hand side, I have Windows Server Core VM and I'm gonna install a comparable latest cumulative update or LCU. This is a traditional update. On each VM, I've queued up two massive file copies as sample workloads and at the top, there's a timer so we can track the time of each patching installation. So I'm gonna start off the patch installation on each VM and I'm gonna start with the traditional LCU or the latest cumulative on the left-hand side. I'm actually gonna give it a head start, okay? So you can see it starting. Now on the right-hand side, oh, the hot patch is done. Oh, it's finished. I hope you didn't blink, you may have missed it. The hot patch is done on the right. We can see the file copy continued uninterrupted. On the left-hand side, you can see the traditional LCU is still going. I feel kind of bad about this, so in case you've missed the first hot patch, let's run a second hot patch on the right-hand side. So let's go back there and we're gonna install a second hot patch and hopefully you didn't blink and miss it and just like that, we're done. And of course, again, you can see that there was zero impact to the running workload. Now one of the great advantages of hot patches is the changes are made in memory. This means that even running processes will pick up the new updates immediately and without interruption. This is one of the great benefits of Azure VMs. Now that we've installed those updates manually, I'm showing you this manually and you can see the left-hand side is still taking a really long time, so we're gonna speed this up here. We're gonna get to seven minutes and 12 seconds and now the traditional update is actually done, but now a reboot is required. If I reboot right now, it's gonna impact my running workload. My file copy is gonna be disrupted, so I don't wanna do that. So I'm gonna wait for this to finish. Let's go ahead and speed this up again. Eight minutes, eight minutes 15 and now we're done and now we can perform the reboot. Whereas the hot patch, again, you get this with Azure VMs running Azure Edition included at no additional cost. Now I showed you hot patching with server core because again, it's a very stark, but I do wanna point out that yes, this also works with the desktop experience as well. So if you wanna hot patch your Windows Server 2022 Azure Edition with the desktop experience, again, that's included at no additional cost. And in case you're wondering, is this hot patch, how real is this? Who's using this? Let me give you a perfect example of a team that's using it, an organization that's using it, running a mission critical workload. That would be the Xbox team. The Xbox team has been, they run mission critical workloads all up in the cloud. Now their Xbox footprint, and this is a partial footprint, is 1,000 servers running 18 different services. Each service is running anywhere between two and 120 SQL servers. Some of these workloads have been running for over 15 years. These workloads used to be physical, then they moved to virtual, now they're Azure VMs. So they have to patch just like everybody else. And so before hot patching, they would patch three weeks every month to roll out updates without downtime. And they would do this 12 times a year. Now keep in mind that they had orchestration and automation, so they would do this without any downtime, but it just took a while. It took three weeks out of every month to roll out the updates. Since they've switched to hot patching, they are now updating all 1,000 servers in less than 48 hours without downtime. It's a life-changing feature. It's a life-changing event for them. All of a sudden now it's freed up a bunch of their time. And in fact, I've even asked them, why is it taking 48 hours? It seems like it could be done much faster than that. And they admitted that they need to update their automation and orchestration and they'll be able to probably get that down to just a few hours. So this is a life-changing difference for how the Xbox is running a number of our services up in the cloud. Now, talked about Azure VMWare solution, fast and easy way, move your VMs up to Azure. Guess what? Your VMWare VMs, no conversion required. If you want to cost optimize and move your VMWare VMs into Azure VMs, yeah, there's a migration. You got to transform the VMWare VMs into Azure VMs, but we have the Azure Migrate tool. So pretty good, huh? Well, what we generally find is this captures a lot of workloads and allows people to move them quickly and easily up into the cloud. But we also get comments like this. While we're moving some apps and workloads to the cloud, we still need to run some apps locally across a highly distributed environment. Guess what? We've got a solution for that as well. And that's VMWare to Azure Stack HCI. And there's a ton of benefits of Azure Stack HCI. First of all, software defined is all included. With Azure Stack HCI, you get integrated virtualization, software defined compute, software defined storage. It's simply all included. High performance, let's start there. Azure Stack HCI is Microsoft's premier hyperconverged infrastructure platform for running VMs, virtual desktops, containers. It provides industry leading performance and value. It's integration with Azure services. Azure Stack HCI is a hybrid product that connects the on-premises system to Azure for cloud-based services, monitoring, and management. It extends many of the same benefits you get from Azure, like hot patching, you can have that on-premises with Azure Stack HCI, as well as extended security updates or ESUs. You get ease of migration and modernization. Azure Stack HCI can help to modernize and secure your branch offices and edge locations, manufacturing sites, retail, you name it. It also allows you to consolidate containers and virtualized workloads and gain cloud efficiencies when data needs to remain on-premises for legal, privacy, latency, governance, whatever the reason is. Of course, high availability and resilience, of course that's all built in, cost effective. You pay for the software via an Azure subscription instead of one buying the hardware. Software Assurance customers receive Azure Stack HCI OS as a benefit. So let me explain this really quickly. From a cost effective standpoint, if you have software assurance, Azure Stack HCI, you already own the OS. Pretty awesome. We delivered that software assurance benefit at the end of 2023, not a lot of people saw it. They may have missed it. So in case you're thinking, gosh, I don't know, is Azure Stack HCI gonna cost me? What's the cost gonna look like? If your software assurance benefit, you already own it, there's no cost. All right, let me give you a quick example of the power of Azure management with Azure Stack HCI. So here's a quick example using 4th coffee. 4th coffee has new locations, there's a roastery and new cafes throughout the Puget Sound region. They've plugged in their Azure Stack HCI solutions, registered them with Azure and voila, five Azure Stack HCI clusters deployed in five different cities and you can see them all in the Azure portal. There's no extra scripts to run, no hassle, this management, everything you see here, this is simply included. So let's drill into one of these clusters. Let's take a look at the Belltown cluster. So now I'm looking specifically at one cluster. This is the Belltown cluster and you can see that 4th coffee has applied tags to each cluster. This identifies the store, the city, the state and name of the cafe. I can see that this cluster is healthy, the number of cores in the cluster and the Azure Stack HCI version. Now, if you look below tags, you can see nodes highlighted by the blue box. If we click on the nodes, we can drill into this cluster even further. We can see this is a two node cluster. You can see the manufacturer and each server node, including the model, serial number, number of cores, memory and more. Now, so far we've just been looking at the physical infrastructure, but let's look at the application layer with Kubernetes apps. For example, I click on Kubernetes clusters and you can see that I have a Kubernetes running in all five of my locations and you can see them in a single view. Now, everything you've seen here has been shipping for a while now. This all shipped with Azure Stack HCI 22H2. Well, now let's take a look at some of the new things in Azure Stack HCI 23H2. And that starts with the lifecycle management feature. This is really, really awesome because one thing we see is people deploy more and more things to the distributed edge. They wanna make sure and ensure that when they deploy those devices, it's done via templates. You may have heard the term infrastructure as code where basically everything is delivered and automated in a completely automated way so all of the hardware looks the same. Well, we have this in Azure, it's called ARM templates. So you can templatize clusters and deploy onto minimally configured servers. Then with Azure Arc, you can set up provisioning for your Kubernetes clusters all via templates as well. Next, you can manage your updates of Azure Stack HCI and from the Azure portal. And I mean hundreds of clusters. I'm not talking about onesie twosies here, hundreds of clusters from the Azure portal. So imagine you're located across an entire country or around the world, you're a multinational organization. You can see all of your Azure Stack HCI clusters. You can understand, am I patched enough to date? And I can even manage those updates all from the Azure portal. Next, we've expanded VM extension support. So I've talked about the physical layer, talked about the Kubernetes layer, but on top of Stack HCI, you're running things like virtual machines and containers. So Azure Stack HCI is about a way to manage all of your VMs and containers consistently from Azure. With VM extensions, you can ensure that every VM running on Azure Stack HCI is protected with Defender for Cloud, monitored with insights and managed with Azure policy. Very powerful stuff here. Next, we have Site Manager to help you organize resources in Azure by location. You can define your sites, your associated resources, whether they're hosts, whether they're AKS clusters, all awesome new features in the Azure portal that just light up with Azure Stack HCI 23H2. And of course, the Core OS, Azure Stack HCI is delivered on an annual basis. So you're getting new features, new capabilities on an annual basis in the Core stack and hypervisor and storage, and new capabilities like improved GPU support, these come on a regular basis. And finally, I wanna point out something that's really awesome about Azure Stack HCI, look at its default security posture. So one of the things we've done here is we've run the Azure security baseline against a deployed Azure Stack HCI, and you'll notice that it's 90%, over 90%, that's pretty amazing. Because Azure Stack HCI is a purpose-built solution, we can lock this thing down very tight. Keep in mind that Azure Stack HCI runs on bare metal, and it's goal in life is to be the best virtualization host for software-defined compute storage, networking VMs and containers, that's all it does. It doesn't run apps, it runs VMs and containers. So because of that, we can lock it down very tightly. This is different as opposed to something like Windows Server. Windows Server is a general-purpose operating system. If I was to apply the same defaults to Windows Server, it's very likely wouldn't be able to deploy in many environments. Azure Stack HCI can be, because it's a purpose-built solution, it can be more definitive about its environment and lock it down even further. Windows Server, I don't remember what the secure storage is by default, but it's nowhere near what Azure Stack HCI. Now, of course, with Windows Server, you can go back and you can add those on your own, but again, you have to test that in environment and make sure that your environment is good with those secure baselines. But this is one of the real benefits of Azure Stack HCI. Now, I've talked a lot about management, I've talked about Kubernetes, I've talked about the fact that I can manage my on-premises using the same Azure portal and the same tools, but you may be wondering, okay, Jeff, this is great, but how do I migrate this? How would I migrate from VMware to Azure Stack HCI? Well, guess what? I would use that same Azure Migrate tool I talked about earlier, use the Azure Migrate tool to migrate to Azure Stack HCI 23H2. There are a number of benefits to using Azure Migrate to migrate your VMs to Azure Stack HCI. Number one, it requires no preparation for your source VMs, including installation of agents prior to migration. It provides the control plane in the Azure portal. So you can use Azure portal to start, run and track your migration. It keeps the data flow local, so it's going from on-premises VMware to Azure Stack HCI. It doesn't go up to the cloud and back down, it all stays on-premises. This results in minimal downtime for the VMs running in your on-premises servers as you migrate from one to the next. Now, of course, one of the other questions I get pretty regularly is this sounds great, except guess what? I've got some really old hardware and I'm probably gonna need to get some newer hardware. Can you help me with that? We have fantastic solutions in the Azure Stack HCI catalog. We've got premier solutions, we've got integrated systems and we've got validated nodes. We have over 500 solutions from all of our partners available worldwide. So pick your favorite partner, take a look in here and I'm sure you're gonna be able to find it. In addition, you may be wondering, okay, Jeff, so if I wanna move my VMware VMs and I'm gonna buy some new hardware, how do I size that hardware? How do I make sure that I'm not buying too much or too little? You know, I wanna buy what's right, but I also want a little headroom for growth too. Well, we have a great tool online called the Azure Stack HCI Sizer and it's actually a great workflow. So the first page, you determine what's my solution preferences? Do I want a premier solution which is kind of the white glove treatment? It's the recommended solution. Do I want an integrated system? Do I want a validated node? Then I choose my processor family, I choose my solution provider. Is it Dell? Is it Lenovo? Is it HPE? Is it data on? Is it another one of these solution providers? Choose my high availability and my storage failures to tolerate. Choose my storage type. Is it all flash? Is it NVME? Is it something else? Also, how much headroom do I wanna leave for growth? I want to plan for future growth? No problem, you can include that in here as well. On the next page, put in a bunch of your sample workloads. I put in some SQL server, some file servers, some domain controllers, some web services for applications. And after that, voilà. I'm given, here's what my suggestion looks like. Here's a Dell Apex Cloud Platform solution. Here's how many cores are being used. Here's how many cores are being used for, are being associated for future growth. Here's how much storage is being used. Here's how much is being used for resiliency. Here's how much is being used for future growth and memory. So you get a very detailed list of what you're looking for in terms of sizing guidelines. And again, like I said, for the other solutions, of course, we have lots of customers that are using Azure Stack HCI. Here's another one from our customer case studies that it's available publicly. But by moving to Azure Stack HCI, we've gone from three full racks of hardware down to less than half a rack. We had a big power hungry infrastructure before, but now we can run more efficiently and cost effectively. We need to spend public funds carefully. With Azure Stack HCI, we're lowering costs and achieving hardware and revenue savings for our citizens. I'm always thrilled to hear stuff like that. That's fantastic. So we've talked about the Azure VMware solution. Again, quick and easy, just move your existing VMware VMs into the Azure VMware solution and keep using your existing tools. We've talked about Azure VMs where you're looking for the most a more cost-effective solution, getting rid of the VMware license, moving to native Azure VMs. You go through a migration process using the Azure Migrate tool. If you say, you know what, I still need to have some workloads running on-premises, well, then Azure Stack HCI is a great way to do it because you can use the Azure portal to keep managing virtual machines and containers running on-premises. Now, for most people, that's probably pretty good and we've got it all covered there. However, there can be a case where people say, you know what, Azure Stack HCI, it's close, but it's not the right fit. And here's why. I have a workload, I have a deployment, I'm in a specific regulated environment where I can't take a hard cloud dependency. Okay, I cannot be connected to cloud. It just will not be allowed. These are becoming fewer and fewer and fewer and much far between. So that doesn't come up very often. But another one is when customers tell us, you know what, Jeff, we have a huge investment in SANS. We have lots of multimillion dollars have been spent on SANS and we really wanna be able to use SANS solutions. So in this last case, if the other three didn't provide everything you needed, we have one more. And that's using VMware to traditional Windows Server and System Center. That's right. Now, you'll notice in this diagram, I have the Azure portal with a dotted line down to System Center. I do wanna point out that that cloud is an option. It is not a requirement. You can run Windows Server and System Center completely disconnected from Azure portal. You're gonna lose a bunch of the ability to deliver cloud services on-premises, but you can add it later on your terms. So let's discuss this even further. With Windows Server and System Center, well, Windows Server is a powerful and flexible operating system used by businesses to host applications, provide secure access to data, manage network infrastructure. You know this. It's running your SQL Server. It's running your Exchange Server. It's running your SharePoint. It's running your thousands of business applications. Windows Server has just been quietly doing this for decades. Of course, it also has advanced virtualization. It has the same Hyper-V. It has the same storage spaces direct. It has the same software defined networking and provides a range of businesses that can help modernize while remaining flexible. I should also point out that Windows Server Data Center includes unlimited Windows Server OS instances for your guests. So with Data Center, again, unlimited guests are included. Enterprise Identity Management. Need I say any more? Active Directory. Active Directory is the gold standard. It's the industry standard for identity management. And of course, this can synchronize with Azure Active Directory. I'm sorry, Entra ID. Gotta get used to that one. And of course, security. Windows Server is designed to run constantly and provide resources for other computers making it a secure choice for business settings. And of course, we continue to harden the platform with secure technologies in the OS and in the kernel that percolate throughout other technologies within Microsoft. And of course, this is for built-in applications. Don't forget that Windows Server includes some of the most used applications that are built into the platform itself. I've already mentioned Active Directory, DHCP, DNS, file services, who doesn't use the Windows Server file server, IAS, web servers, remote desktop services, and more. And then finally, the cloud on your terms. When you're ready, you can arc enable your servers for unified management, governance, and security, and protection from Azure. Now, one thing I wanna point out. I wanna be super clear about this. I wanna be super transparent about this for these people that are, if you're new to this area and you're thinking, oh, Windows Server and System Center, this sounds really easy. I wanna be very clear about something. Let's talk about System Center Management for just a second. Okay, you may be familiar with Windows Server because you're already deploying in your VM or VMs or you've been deploying it for a while, but System Center is enterprise management. Let me be very clear about this. This is enterprise, this is data center management. And what does that mean? Well, the good news is, number one, it's a single license for end-to-end management. It includes enabling, deploying, protecting, monitoring, config, automation. And the portfolio, it looks just like this. It's orchestrator, it's config man, it's operations manager, it's service manager, it's virtual machine manager, it's data protection manager. I wanna be super transparent about this. If you're saying, hey, Jeff, I really wanna do all this old school. I wanna do all this on-prem. Keep in mind, you're gonna have to install System Center. You're gonna have to install each one of these products. They all require hardware, they all require, well, they all require infrastructure, so you have to run on something on-premises. We release System Center every few years right after Windows Server. So we had a System Center 2012, we had a System Center 2016, we had a System Center 2019, we had a System Center 2022. And it means every time there's an upgrade, you're gonna have to manage the upgrade. Also, all of these products use databases, they use SQL Server, they use storage, they use memory. So I just wanna be very clear about this, because the cloud really does offer a tremendous advantage here. We simply give you a management portal and we light up features, and you never have to update anything because we are providing all of those services through the cloud. We just light up new features, we light up new capabilities, and you just get to consume them. It's a beautiful thing. With System Center, you're saying, no, no, I'm gonna take on that. I'm gonna take on that responsibility. And I'm gonna care and manage all of these products, all of the infrastructure, all of the patching. Okay, and if you're saying, Jeff, you're still going, I'm really cool with that, then party on. Let's talk about conversion then. So if I wanted to convert from VMware to use Windows Server, how would I do that? Well, I would use System Center Virtual Machine Manager to convert from VMware to Windows Server Hyper-V. I would select my vCenter server. You can see I have a convert option here to convert the virtual machine. I then select the VMware source. I then specify the VM configuration and let the migration and conversion begin. Now, one thing I want to point out is we continue to add features and capabilities. And in fact, when it comes to VM conversion, one of the things that was recently added to System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2022 Update Release 2 is it's up to a four times faster converting VMs. That's right, four times faster. This is a pretty blistering performance improvement. So something to keep in mind if you're thinking about going down this path. So we've talked about Microsoft solutions. Let's recap them. We started off by talking about the Azure VMware solution. The Azure VMware solution, again, I take my existing VMs. I'm literally with the VMware HCX tools, move them into Azure VMware and I continue managing using all the tools I love. You love your vCenter, keep using your vCenter. You love your NSX, keep using your NSX. Again, the fact is you're not managing the hardware, we're managing this bare metal solution for you and you get to continue using VMware. You purchase everything from us, you don't have to deal with the VMware license, that's included with AVS and you get the benefits of looking into integrating with Azure services. For those folks that say, you know what? Quick is great, but cost is more important. I really, really need to lower my costs. That's where Azure VMs come in. Now you're talking about taking my VMware virtual machines and actually using the Azure Migrate tool to migrate them into Azure VMs. They get lots of benefits from that. Again, cost, because there is a cost optimization that just occurs because simply you're not, there's no VMware license in there. You're using the native Azure hypervisor. On top of that, you get ESUs. You get hot patching, that cool hot patching I showed you or I hot patched a Windows Server Azure Edition virtual machine. You get hot patching if you're running on Azure VMs at no additional cost. That's simply part of the solution. For those folks that say, hey, you know what? I need to run on premises. I need to run in a distributed cloud environment, Azure Stack HCI. You can use the Azure portal to manage your HCI in a distributed location. And I'll be honest with you, the vast majority of customers tell us cloud connectivity is not a problem. It really isn't. Azure Stack HCI connects to the cloud. The minimum requirement is once every 30 days. Of course, once you start using it and realize, hey, I can patch, I can monitor, I can do things from the cloud, it's a tremendous benefit. Of course, you can use things like VPN, you can use ExpressRoute, all of these things. Don't worry about the security folks. We've got all of this documented so you can take a look and see exactly every single port that's used and how that connectivity works. But it's a fantastic solution for distributed cloud and edge where you still need to have an on-premises footprint. And now you have a consistent management environment through the Azure portal. Lastly, there's Windows Server and System Center. Again, for those folks that say, hey, you know what? I can't have an always cloud connected solution. I need a disconnected solution or we're just not there yet. You know what? We'll be cloud connected in six months or a year from now or two years. We've got it in the plan. We're just not there yet. And we need to get off, we want to reduce our costs on VMware. And so Windows Server and System Center can be that solution. So finally, we've spent some time going through these different solutions. I hope this really helps you understand the number of click stops that are available when it comes to Microsoft solutions. Next, I want to kind of switch gears and really kind of respond to the frequently asked questions that we're receiving from customers all around the world. So let's start with this one. Microsoft, your competitors claim that Hyper-V isn't important to Microsoft or that Microsoft is deprecating Hyper-V. I'm sorry, I'm laughing because that's ridiculous. It's patently ridiculous. Microsoft, can you explain? Absolutely. Let me explain this in detail. Let's start off by saying that Hyper-V is a strategic Microsoft technology. And you don't even need to believe me. Just look at where we're using Hyper-V. Hyper-V is used in this little thing called Azure. Maybe you've heard of it. It's used in the entire Azure Stack family. It's used in Windows Server. It's used in Windows Client. So just for virtualization alone, you can see it's used across the Microsoft portfolio from client to edge all the way to the cloud itself. Next, you can see that we use containers with Hyper-V isolation. We've always believed that hypervisors are fantastic tools, but to use them purely and only for virtualization is kind of short-sighted. There's actually a lot of benefits that virtualization can be used for, for containers with Hyper-V isolation, for platform security with virtualization based security. We have actually stopped classes of attacks with VBS. It's that powerful. So we use it for security. We use it for isolation. We use it for virtualization. Oh, and by the way, the Xbox team even uses it in Xbox. Now, you're not gonna hear them talk about it because it's not really something they want to tout. They want to tout games and I get it. But the point is Hyper-V is used everywhere within Microsoft. So the idea that we would deprecate it or that it's not important is pretty ridiculous. Just to give you one example of how we're using Hyper-V, here's a single virtual machine in Azure. This is one VM. This isn't a cluster. This isn't a bunch of physical servers. This is one virtual machine. This has 1,792 virtual processors and 29.7 terabytes of RAM. Now let me apologize right off the bat. This is not the largest VM that we have in Azure by a bit. Unfortunately, those are busy running some of the largest workloads on the planet. So this is one that we could actually get access to and get you a screenshot of. So this is 1,792 virtual processors and 29.7 terabytes of RAM in a single VM. So we've been continuing to iterate in performance and scale and security and automation across the board with Hyper-V. And we will continue to do that for the very long, long time. Next question. Jeff, should customers use Azure Stack-8 CI or Windows Server? When should they use one versus the other? You know what? This is a really great question. And you know, it can be a little confusing because the products can look kind of similar but I hope this helps kind of clear it up. So let's start with Azure Stack-8 CI and Windows Server. Let's kind of walk down this together. So both of them have exciting new releases just to be super clear. We got Azure Stack-8 CI 23H2 just came out. Super awesome. Windows Server 2025 coming out at the end of this year or sorry, second half of this year, that's gonna be awesome. So really excited about both of these, all of these happening. Now Azure Stack-8 CI is focused on being the best purpose-built virtualization host. That is all it does. It runs VMs and it runs containers and it runs on hardware. That's it. It does not run apps. You don't run SQL Server on it. You don't run Exchange on it. You don't run SharePoint on it. You run SharePoint and Exchange and SQL inside of virtual machines on top of Azure Stack-8 CI. So all it is is focused on being the best host, runs on hardware and it's managed from Azure. It's managed from the cloud. Now on the Windows Server side, the innovation there is being focused on being the best guest and general purpose server. And what do I mean by that? Number one, look at all of the built-in applications. We call them roles, but the built-in applications in Windows Server, IAS, file services, DNS, DHCP, Active Directory, and oh, look at that, Hyper-V, Storage Spaces Direct, SDN, Remote Desktop Services, et cetera. And it supports local storage, file storage and remote sand storage. So we've got flexibility there. Also, let's not forget that Windows Server is a runtime for Windows apps like SQL Server, Exchange, SharePoint and tens of thousands of apps that exist out there that folks have built their applications on and are building new applications on Windows Server every day. Now Windows Server runs anywhere, okay? It runs on physical, it runs on virtual and it can be managed from on-premises or it can be optionally managed from the cloud as well. So I hope that helps kind of explain those two. I also wanna point out there are some important differences. Azure Stack HCI has some pretty awesome advantages that I wanna make sure you understand. I talked about hot-patching. Well, not only can you hot-patch in Azure, but you can hot-patch on Azure Stack HCI if you're running Windows Server Azure Edition at no additional cost. So you can have hot-patching on-premises. Now, we've had so many people asking for hot-patching on-premises outside of Azure, for example, on physical machines that with starting with Windows Server 2025, if you arc-enable your Windows Server standard or data center edition, okay? If you arc-enable those, then you will be able to hot-patch even if it's running on physical or on VMware or on another cloud, but it will be part of a monthly Azure subscription. With Azure Stack HCI, it's included. Same is true for ESUs, extended security updates. With Azure Stack HCI, that is an Azure benefit that is included with Windows Server that's an optional arc-enabled feature. Azure Virtual Desktops, this is a tremendous Azure service that a number of folks has said we really need this on-premises like healthcare, where they need to provide patient services in the case of a natural disaster. And all of a sudden, the entire city's without power, the hospital can fire up their generators. They still need to be able to provide patient care. So AVD is available as a solution on Azure Stack HCI. It does cost, there is a charge for it, but it is available on-premises. With Windows Server, that's not the case. You can provision VMs from the Azure Marketplace. Management is via Azure. Arc-enabled is built-in Azure Stack HCI and the OS updates with Azure Stack HCI are annual. So you're gonna get a lot of new features on a lot of new innovation much faster with Stack HCI. All right, finally, question number three. You mentioned industry-leading storage performance with Hyper-V and storage spaces direct. Do you have evidence of that? Actually, I do. This is from a storage review article where they tested Hyper-V running in Azure Stack HCI. And they did a head-to-head of Azure Stack HCI versus VMware vSAN. And it's publicly available, you can read it. We didn't even know they were working on this head-to-head review until after they were done. They actually ran the same exact test on Azure Stack HCI then ran the same exact test on the same exact hardware using VMware vSAN. And the results were stark difference. 4.2 more 4K random reads than vSAN. In case you're wondering what's a 4K random read, it's what your HCI configuration is doing all the time because you have multiple virtual machines talking to the underlying storage and multiplexing access to storage. So your storage is almost always 4K random reads. They then went a step further and said, let's test something a little bit more mission critical. Let's test SQL server. And they found that Azure Stack HCI was 6.1 greater SQL throughput than vSAN. And so their result was it doesn't even come close. So again, to recap, we've got the Azure VMware solution for folks that wanna move quickly and easily. We've got Azure VMs for the most cost-effective. We've got Azure Stack HCI for folks that wanna run distributed cloud and edge and still manage from the same Azure portal. Windows Server and System Center for folks that just aren't quite there yet on cloud, need a little bit more time, you can add it on your own terms. So while we've been discussing VMware migration options, I also don't wanna lose sight of the larger picture. There's really a bigger vision and strategy at Microsoft and that's adaptive cloud. Our approach with adaptive cloud is to unify siloed teams, distributed sites and sprawling systems into a single operations security application and data model. This approach enables organizations to leverage cloud native and AI technologies to work simultaneously across distributed, hybrid, multicloud, edge and IoT with Azure as the control plane. An adaptive cloud approach shifts organizations from a reactive posture to a proactive posture, enabling people to anticipate and act upon changes in market trends, customer needs and technological advancements ahead of time. This strategic foresight enables businesses to pivot quickly, embrace continuous improvement and integrate new technologies seamlessly. I hope the session has been informative and really helpful and I thank you for your time.