Real-World Use Cases: Azure VMs, AVS, EC2, EVS & SQL Server

Post 4 in my Everpure Cloud series. New here? Start with Post 1 for the full roadmap.

We’ve covered the “what” (Post 2) and the “how” (Post 3). Now let’s get into the “so what” — the actual workloads people are running on Everpure Cloud today. If you’re evaluating this for your own environment, this is probably the post you skipped ahead to, and that’s fair.

Azure Virtual Machines

This is the use case that’s moved the most recently, so it’s worth spending extra time here. Everpure Cloud Azure Native for Azure VMs — a fully managed offering jointly engineered by Everpure and Microsoft — reached general availability in 2026. It lets you provision enterprise-grade block storage volumes and attach them directly to Azure VMs, fully managed inside the Azure portal. No appliances to stand up, no separate storage stack to stitch together: volumes mount as standard Windows or Linux disks, with thin provisioning, deduplication, and compression built in, and capacity and IOPS scale independently of compute.

For teams standardizing on Azure, this is now the lowest-friction entry point into Everpure Cloud — and given how recently it hit GA, it’s worth checking the current release notes for supported regions and configurations before you plan a rollout.

Azure VMware Solution (AVS)

This one’s personal for me, given my VMware background. AVS lets you run a native VMware SDDC inside Azure, which is a great option for organizations that aren’t ready (or don’t want) to re-platform their applications to be cloud-native, but still want the operational and financial benefits of running in Azure.

The wrinkle with AVS has always been storage — VMware environments have specific expectations around how storage behaves, and translating that cleanly into a public cloud context isn’t trivial. Everpure Cloud’s support for AVS is worth a close look if you’re supporting VMware workloads in Azure and want storage that doesn’t require you to relearn how you think about capacity, snapshots, or performance.

Amazon EC2

On the AWS side, Everpure Cloud Dedicated extends the same storage-intensive workload support to EC2 instances. This is where the “Dedicated works on both clouds” point from Post 2 actually pays off — if you’re multi-cloud, you’re not learning a second operational model just because you crossed from Azure to AWS.

Worth flagging for security-conscious teams: a recent platform update now deploys all Lambda functions associated with Everpure Cloud Dedicated for AWS inside your own VPC by default, rather than outside it. If your org has network isolation or compliance requirements around where cloud components execute, this is the kind of detail that decides whether a deployment clears review — I’d recommend confirming the exact version/rollout status with your Everpure contact before you rely on it in a compliance conversation.

Amazon Elastic VMware Service (EVS)

The AWS equivalent of the AVS story: native VMware workloads running inside AWS. Same logic applies — if your team already knows how to think about VMware storage operations, EVS plus Everpure Cloud is aiming to preserve that mental model rather than force a rebuild.

SQL Server 2025 on Azure

This is a good one to slow down on, because database workloads are usually where storage performance and protection requirements get the most demanding. Running SQL Server on Azure with Everpure Cloud underneath is positioned around hybrid flexibility — the ability to run demanding, transaction-heavy workloads with consistent performance and data protection whether the primary instance sits on-prem or in Azure.

If you’ve ever had to explain to a DBA why the cloud version of “the same database” performs differently than on-prem, you know why this use case gets its own line item instead of getting lumped in with “general VM storage.”

Which use case should you dig into first?

If I had to prioritize for a reader trying to figure out where to start:

• Already all-in on Azure, standard VM workloads? → Azure VMs is your on-ramp
• Running VMware and don’t want to re-platform? → AVS or EVS depending on your cloud
• Multi-cloud shop? → EC2 + AVS/EVS combo, via Dedicated
• Performance-sensitive databases? → The SQL Server on Azure story is worth a dedicated conversation with your DBA team before you commit to an architecture

Coming up

We’ve talked architecture and use cases — now let’s talk money. Post 5 digs into the FinOps side: predictable pricing, built-in data efficiency, and the questions you should be asking before you sign anything.

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