Midserver migration to Azure or drop VMWare?

[pbostian]

With the Broadcom acquisition of VMWare, our vm costs are now bordering on ridiculous.  As a result, we are moving as much as possible to our Azure cloud.  We're talking thousands of VMs.  15 of those are my midservers.  I already have ONE midserver in Azure for discovery *of* Azure.  the other 14 on prem do various things - 6 for local network desktop discovery, 3 for local server discovery, one for event management, one for service mapping, etc... 

Question is this... i'm 100% NOT a fan of moving the local desktop/server discovery mids to Azure, as the data costs would be extreme.  just ONE of my mids does 2-3Gb of traffic an hour, 24/7.  Plus all the data latency issues, etc.  the Azure data cost would be big.  Has anyone kept their mids on-prem with a different virtualization service?

I know i need to keep them local... just dont know how yet and hoping someone has already gone through this and can help.

[Abbas_5]

Hello @pbostian,

Please refer to the link below:
https://www.servicenow.com/community/itom-forum/mid-server-migration-to-azure-cloud/m-p/943330

https://www.servicenow.com/docs/bundle/yokohama-it-operations-management/page/product/it-operations-...

If it is helpful, please hit the thumbs up button and accept the correct solution by referring to this solution in the future, as it will be helpful to them.

Thanks & Regards,

Abbas Shaik

[AJ-TechTrek · Accepted solution]

Hi @pbostian ,

You’re absolutely right to keep local discovery MID Servers on-prem

* Discovery traffic is very chatty: WMI, SNMP, SSH, probes, patterns… easily 2–3GB/hour per MID.
* Moving those MID Servers into Azure → big egress data charges + higher latency → discovery becomes slower & less reliable.

1) Options to keep MID Servers on-prem without VMware
If you’re moving away from VMware, but still want on-prem:

a) Physical servers
* For critical MID Servers, run them as physical machines.
* It removes hypervisor cost completely.
* Easy to manage if your fleet of MIDs is relatively small (e.g., < 20).

b) Alternative virtualization:
* Use Proxmox, XCP-ng, KVM, Hyper-V (free / Windows Server role), or even Nutanix AHV.
* All are production-ready, some open source, some with support options.
* For most orgs, Hyper-V is often a popular drop-in since it’s built into Windows Server, no extra license.
* Proxmox and XCP-ng are used widely in mid-sized enterprise environments for internal infra.

c) Containerize your MID servers (experimental / advanced):
* ServiceNow officially supports running MID Server as a Docker container.
* Great for CI/CD and dynamic scaling.
* You’d still need on-prem container hosts → but those could be on KVM, bare-metal, or cheaper hypervisors.
Ref:
“You can install a MID Server on Docker on a Linux host.” – ServiceNow docs

2) Keep your MID Server placement based on what they discover
MID Purpose Where it should be deployed
Local servers / desktops On-prem MID Server, near data center, low latency
Event Management from local infra On-prem MID Server
Service Mapping of on-prem apps On-prem MID
Discover Azure / Azure native services MID in Azure subnet (already have!)
Discover AWS / GCP MID in respective cloud
Best practice: Always place MID Server as close as possible to the CIs it needs to discover / monitor.

3) Practical steps:
A. Identify what each MID does → group by target environment.


B. Choose the cheapest & reliable on-prem hypervisor (e.g., Hyper-V / KVM / Proxmox).


C. Keep at least two on-prem MIDs for redundancy.


D. Keep your cloud MIDs in Azure for discovering Azure resources only.

4) Security & firewall
* Local on-prem MIDs still need outbound HTTPS (443) to ServiceNow instance.
* No inbound port needed → keeps security simple.

5) Why this works:
* You don’t lose ServiceNow discovery / event capacity.
* Avoid big cloud egress charges.
* Avoid Broadcom VMware costs by moving infra to alternative hypervisors.

Summary / Recommended:
* Keep on-prem MID Servers for anything local.
* Move only cloud discovery MIDs into Azure/AWS.
* Consider Hyper-V / KVM / Proxmox / Nutanix AHV instead of VMware.
* Docker MID Servers are interesting, but you still need on-prem hosts.

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Thank You
AJ - TechTrek with AJ
LinkedIn:- https://www.linkedin.com/in/ajay-kumar-66a91385/
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ServiceNow Community MVP 2025