News

VMware Expands, Improves Its AWS Hybrid Cloud Solution

• By Wendy A. Hernandez
• 08/27/2018

VMware kicked off its 2018 VMworld conference in Las Vegas on Monday by announcing several enhancements to its VMware Cloud on AWS hybrid offering, which first went live a year ago.

For starters, VMware Cloud on AWS is now available in the Asia-Pacific (Sydney) region. Mark Lohmeyer, senior vice president and general manager of VMware's Cloud Platform Business Unit, described VMware Cloud on AWS as "a fast and cost-effective way to migrate mission-critical applications, or even entire datacenters, to the cloud."

Lohmeyer added in a prepared statement, "And once in the cloud, we provide the industry-leading Software-Defined Data Center capabilities of VMware, coupled with the elasticity, breadth, and depth of AWS infrastructure and services, making it the ideal platform for modern applications."

Additional updates detailed in the press release include the following:

• A new minimum configuration and 50 percent lower entry-level price: Production workloads will have a three-host minimum SDDC configuration starting point, while for a limited time VMware will offer the three-host SDDC for the cost of just two hosts. In addition, the entry price for VMware Cloud on AWS will be reduced by 50 percent.
• License optimization for enterprise applications (Oracle/Microsoft): With VM-Host Affinity, customers will be able to pin workloads to a specific host group to support licensing requirements. Also, new custom CPU core count capabilities, will allow customers to specify just the number of CPU cores they need, which can help reduce the cost of running mission-critical applications that are licensed per CPU core.
• Instant datacenter evacuation with live migration of thousands of VMs: With VMware NSX Hybrid Connect (previously known as VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension) powered by vMotion and vSphere Replication, customers will be able to live migrate thousands of VMs with zero downtime. VMware is offering a free migration cost assessment with VMware Cost Insight to assist with cloud migration planning.
• New high-capacity storage option, backed by Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS): Independently scale compute and storage resource requirement with new clusters for storage-dense environments. With VMware vSAN utilizing Amazon EBS, and running on new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) R5.metal instances, these clusters deliver scalable storage capabilities. Amazon EC2 R5.metal instances are based on 2.5 GHz Intel Platinum 8000 series (Skylake-SP) processors. Each host has two sockets, 48 cores, 96 hyper-threads, 768GB RAM, and 25 Gbps network bandwidth.
• Application-centric security with VMware NSX: Granular control over east-west traffic between workloads running in VMware Cloud on AWS can be achieved through micro-segmentation provided by NSX. Security policies can be defined based on workload attributes and user-defined tags, are dynamically enforced at the VM level, and follow workloads wherever they're moved.
• NSX/AWS Direct Connect integration for simplified, high-performance connectivity: Integration between NSX and AWS Direct Connect will enable private and consistent connectivity between VMware workloads running on VMware Cloud on AWS and those running on-premises. This integration will also accelerate migration to the cloud and enable multi-tier hybrid applications.
• Optimized cost/performance with autoscaling: Elastic DRS enables automated scaling up or scaling down of hosts and rebalancing of clusters, based on the needs of the applications and the policies the customer defines. In addition, Elastic DRS allows users to automate VMware Cloud on AWS cluster scaling.
• Real-time log management: For no additional cost, customers have access to VMware Cloud on AWS audit logs with VMware Log Intelligence, which provides increased security and compliance.

While services in the AWS Asia-Pacific (Sydney) region, Elastic DRS, Log Intelligence Service, and Cost Insight Migration Assessment are all available today, the three-host configuration, custom CPU core count, VM-Host Affinity, new NSX Hybrid Connect capabilities, EBS support, the Amazon EC2 R5.metal instance type, NSX and AWS Direct Connect integration, and NSX micro-segmentation are still in preview. The status of the latest features of VMware Cloud on AWS is available on the company's Web site.