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VMware, AWS Announce Updates to Their Hybrid Cloud
VMware Cloud on AWS, a three-month-old hybrid cloud offering that lets customers run their on-premises vSphere environments on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, is getting a string of improvements.
Announced Tuesday at the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, the improvements are in varying stages of readiness, with some immediately available and others due to arrive by February of next year, during VMware's fiscal fourth quarter.
Billing and Region Availability
As of today, VMware Cloud on AWS is available out of AWS' Northern Virginia region. Initially, it was only available out of the Oregon region.
Also immediately available are new one- and three-year subscription options. Previously, the only billing option for the product was by the hour. VMware is also offering discounts to customers with existing on-premises licenses for its vSphere, NSX and vSAN products. These discounts, available under VMware's Hybrid Loyalty Program, can potentially save customers 25 percent, VMware said in its announcement.
Data and Application Protection
Also available today as an optional add-on is VMware Site Recovery, which VMware said "delivers protection between customer datacenters and VMware Cloud on AWS, or between environments running in separate AWS Availability Zones (AZs)."
VMware also now offers support for its Wavefront solution, which "allows customers to visualize, alert upon, and troubleshoot applications running on VMware Cloud on AWS."
Application Migration
A new capability expected by early 2018 will let customers migrate their applications from their on-premises VMware environments to VMware Cloud on AWS without having to reconfigure their network or experiencing any disruptions. This capability will be enabled through a combination of "VMware vSphere vMotion, new L2 stretched networking features and AWS Direct Connect," according to VMware.
Also in the works is an add-on called VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension. In preview as of Tuesday, this SaaS add-on aims to allow organizations to move large amounts of applications from their on-premises datacenters to VMware Cloud on AWS without significant downtime.
"Hybrid Cloud Extension will provide built-in high-performance Layer 2 extensions so customers will be able to keep the same networks, IP and routing policies in place while moving workloads," VMware said. "This eliminates the need for extensive application dependency mapping when migrating applications to VMware Cloud on AWS."
Scalability
VMware said it is also planning to bring multi-cluster support to VMware Cloud on AWS, enabling customers to support more resource-intensive workloads.
"VMware Cloud on AWS supports 32 host clusters and multiple software-defined data centers (SDDC) per organization today, and will support 10 clusters per SDDC soon," the company said.
The update promises to give customers the ability to support as many as tens of thousands of virtual machines in their environments.
"The momentum for VMware Cloud on AWS is growing rapidly, and VMware and AWS are delivering major new capabilities after only three months of availability while enhancing our strategic relationship with new integrations across our platforms," said Mark Lohmeyer, the vice president and general manager of VMware's Cloud Platform business, in a prepared statement about the new improvements. "Customers of VMware Cloud on AWS will be able to migrate application portfolios to the cloud even more rapidly with Hybrid Cloud Extension and AWS Direct Connect, while maintaining the optimal levels of performance, scale and availability required for mission-critical apps."
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