Question

What can VMWare offer me that azure doesn’t?
Can somebody list a couple of differeces between the two?

Is VmWare offering a service similar to Amazon’s cloud?

I heared about Azure a lot, but very rarely I hear about VMWare. Is that just because advertising or why I didnt see VMWare that often. They state that something like 70% of the cloud computing runs on their solutions.

I tried to look over their website but I see no comparisons and clear specifications of what they do

Answer 1

VMWare is a company that sells virtualization solutions. Generally they allow you to create a series of virtual machines that run on top of one or more physical machines. Those virtual machines behave much like a physical machine, where you can remote into them and configure them. VMWare distributes this software, which other companies can use to setup their own virtualization environments. Many “cloud” hosting companies either VMWare’s technology or Microsoft’s HyperV technology to do this. In this case, while the hardware and much of the networking is virtualized away from you, you are still responsible for configuring and maintaining and patching the operating system. This is often referred to as infrastructure-as-a-service.

Azure is a service offered by Microsoft that is similar, but focuses on a more restrictive platform-as-a-service offering. Microsoft runs a series of virtual machines, with an additional layer of abstraction for hosting web applications. While Azure has recently added a feature to allow you to remote directly into the VM, the primary usage is to create and upload Azure-packaged web applications, and to allow Azure to handle all of the operating-system level interaction. Additionally, because Azure more tightly controls the environment, and has specifically restricted the VMs to make them stateless, it allows Azure to create scale out additional server images just by changing some settings.

So it comes down to the amount of abstraction you are looking for and the amount of control you need. For many developers, Azure is ideal because it allows them to focus almost exclusively on writing code without worrying about infrastructure, but often times you need to switch down to a VMWare or HyperV solution in order to exercise the most control over the environments.