Announcing the new VMware migration offer for Windows Server 2016

With the launch of Windows Server 2016, customers have more reasons than ever to switch from VMware to Microsoft. We want to make it an easy decision for VMware customers to switch to Hyper-V, so today we are announcing a new VMware migration offer.

Free Windows Server Datacenter licenses when you buy Windows Server Datacenter + Software Assurance

From September 1, 2016, through June 30, 2017, customers who switch workloads from VMware to Hyper-V can get free Windows Server Datacenter licenses when buying Windows Server Datacenter + Software Assurance. That ultimately means customers only pay for Software Assurance, which provides multiple benefits.

More reasons to switch to Windows Server 2016 than ever before

We are looking forward to September and the Ignite conference where we will launch Windows Server 2016 and System Center 2016. This will mark the release of the OS and the management platform that will bring new security capabilities such as Shielded Virtual Machines, Just Enough and Just in Time Administration along with many other security features as well as new software-defined datacenter capabilities for compute, storage, and networking, such as Rolling OS Cluster Upgrades, Storage Spaces Direct, Storage Replica, the SDN Load Balancer, Network Controller, Distributed Firewall, and the Azure Data Plane for starters.

New TCO comparison tool

A clear cloud strategy that will support your technical and business needs for the years to come, unique security features in Windows Server 2016, native solutions that you don’t need to pay extra to use, support for hyper-converged and disaggregated deployments for small and large enterprise – these are some of the reasons why you should choose Microsoft over VMware. However, if you’re still wondering if the transition to Microsoft makes sense, we wanted to give you another reason: Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

To make sure the comparison is clear and up-to-date, we are launching the Microsoft vs VMware TCO comparison tool, which will calculate the software requirements from Microsoft with Windows Server 2016 Datacenter, System Center 2016 Datacenter, and Operations Management Suite and VMware with vCloud Suite, vSAN, NSX, and vCloud Air Disaster Recovery. We are launching our tool following the new licensing model for Windows Server and System Center 2016, which is based on per-core licensing. (By the way, VMware recently launched a new TCO comparison tool. Their main assumption is based on a density comparison from a woefully out-of-date document that compares vSphere 5 to Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 which is three releases and six years ago. Furthermore, this document does not reflect rich new capabilities, many of which VMware still hasn’t caught up to in ESX 6.0. We would strongly recommend you take that into consideration when interpreting their results).

Below is the output for a hypothetical environment with 100 virtualization hosts with 2 procs and 8 cores per proc. In this scenario, we’re assuming a VMware environment is in place and the customer will have to migrate the VMs (10 per host) as well as renew the Windows Server licenses. To make it simple, we’re also not including public cloud disaster recovery, which can be added later for comparison:

Get started now!

To be eligible for the VMware migration offer, customers must follow these steps:

• Step 1: Engage your account executive or sales rep to begin the process.
• Step 2: Identify virtualized workloads to migrate and specify the Windows Server Datacenter cores required.
• Step 3: Provide your account executive proof of eligibility. (Offer applicable to customers migrating from VMware to Microsoft).
• Step 4: Engage your partner to start the migration process.
• Step 5: Receive free Windows Server Datacenter licenses with Software Assurance and pay only the cost of Software Assurance to kick start your migration.

Check out the new VMware Shift website for more detailed information as well as technical comparisons and more reasons to choose Microsoft over VMware.

That’s not all! We still have more to announce, so keep an eye on the new announcements from Twitter and Facebook.

Note: This offer requires an Enterprise Agreement (EA) contract.