News

What's New for VMware Cloud on AWS

• By David Ramel
• 08/29/2019

The Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) cloud platform was featured prominently at this week's big VMworld conference, with new functionality being added to the managed service and a new study highlighting enterprise cost savings.

The focus of the latest release of VMware Cloud on AWS is the migration and modernization of workloads, the virtualization giant said at its San Francisco conference.

"A new Cloud Migration experience is available on VMware Cloud on AWS today through the Cloud Console, and over time other workflows are planned to be available on VMware Cloud on AWS as well as other platforms such as VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts and VMware Cloud on Dell EMC," VMware said in a statement.

The Cloud Migration services are powered by VMware HCX, which simplifies the complex tasks associated with migrations to the hybrid cloud, such as identifying, planning and moving workloads.

And that wasn't all for new HCX functionality. "New VMware HCX capabilities enable push-button migration and interconnectivity between VMware Cloud on AWS SDDCs running in different AWS Regions and new Elastic vSAN support further improves storage scaling," VMware said. "Once applications are migrated, customers can extend the capabilities of applications through integration of native AWS Services."

There was also some AWS-related news in the Disaster Recovery as-a-Service(DRaaS) and data protection space, as VMware will team up with Dell EMC for new solutions based on using AWS S3 storage buckets for VMware Cloud on AWS.

VMware also highlighted recent research from Faction, a managed services provider for VMware Cloud on AWS. Faction's CEO, Sean Charnock, said: “A recent research report that we published shows that VMware Cloud on AWS usage could explode over the next two years. Scalability, support for strategic initiatives, and cost savings will be the biggest drivers for VMware Cloud on AWS interest and adoption. This is consistent with what we’ve seen from our VMware Cloud on AWS customers, who are using our portfolio of value added services, including Hybrid Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service and cloud-attached storage.”

Highlights of the survey include:

• Top drivers of VMware Cloud on AWS include: scalability, strategic IT initiatives and cost savings.
• More than half (55 percent) of the respondents who have workloads on off-premises Private Cloud are considering VMware Cloud on AWS.
• In predicting market growth, the study said: "Usage, both for SMBs and large enterprises, could grow significantly over the next 12-24 months, particularly in the tech services, financial services, and educational industries."
• Top use cases include datacenter extension, disaster recovery and cloud migration.
• The top four industries considering VMware Cloud on AWS are: tech services; financial services; education; healthcare.
• Almost one-third of respondents plan to start running or increase workloads in the next 12 months.
• Top three reasons for not considering VMware Cloud on AWS include:
  • Plan to keep all IT resources on-premises for the foreseeable future
  • Don't know enough about VMware Cloud on AWS
  • Plan to use public clouds like AWS or Azure natively
• The top three challenges to migrate to VMware Cloud on AWS include:
  • Executing the actual migration of workloads
  • Assessing workloads before
  migration
  • Lack of VMware Cloud on AWS and migration expertise
• The top three usage challenges of VMware Cloud on AWS include:
  • Cost management
  • Network complexity
  • AWS prerequisites
• Top objections for choosing VMware Cloud on AWS include:
  • Too expensive (46 percent)
  • Moved directly to public cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP) (24 percent)
  • Perceived lack of cost effective, external storage (15 percent)

The survey, conducted in June-July 2019, garnered 1,156 respondents.