News

AWS Gets VMware Offerings via Ravello

• By David Ramel
• 08/19/2015

Ravello Systems today announced two offerings that provide VMware-based services on public clouds, including Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS).

The "nested virtualization" specialist unveiled InfinityDC -- which allows organizations to expand their VMware-based datacenters in the cloud without buying more hardware -- and InceptionSX, which lets them run VMware ESXi hypervisors in the cloud. In addition to AWS, both products also run on the Google Cloud Platform.

"With InfinityDC, enterprises can auto-deploy a full VMware environment with complex networking in five minutes inside of AWS, as well as support a live migration using vMotion from an existing data center to a new environment inside of AWS and Google," the company said in a statement.

Organizations can grow or shrink VMware datacenters through the on-demand deployment of VSphere hosts in the cloud on an hourly basis with InfinityDC, the company said, with central management via VPN.

"Expanding a datacenter is a huge investment for an enterprise, and in my role as a consultant I have seen that the undertaking is often driven by peak and not average capacity requirements," the company quoted Robert Verdam of bConn ICT as saying. "This means most of the hardware will be under-utilized, making the whole project uneconomical. I see the ability to expand a VMware data center into AWS and Google Cloud to meet bursty requirements as a tremendous advantage for enterprises. I have personally used Ravello's nested ESXi in both AWS and Google and the convenience factor is so huge that I'd highly recommend it."

The foundational technology backing InfinityDC, the company said, is InceptionSX, described as the only product to let enterprises run VMware ESXi hypervisors on the public clouds.

"The release of InceptionSX follows a successful four-month beta period that saw the technology battle-tested by over 1,250 VMware users, with more than 1 million ESXi CPU hours run and 25,000 ESXi labs published," Ravello said in a statement today. "During the beta, users created labs for several VMware products -- such as vSphere, vCenter, NSX, VSAN, vRealize Operations as well as for other partner products in the VMware ecosystem including Catalogic, Actifio, Veeam, vArmour, NetApp, EMC, Infinio and Nexenta -- and deployed them on either AWS or Google Cloud."

Ravello's service starts at 14 cents per hour.