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VMware Cloud on AWS Adding Connectivity, Multitenancy Features
Executives from VMware and Amazon Web Services (AWS) this week gave an update on their joint offering, VMware Cloud on AWS, as well as described upcoming new capabilities.
In a press briefing Tuesday, Mark Lohmeyer, senior vice president of Cloud Platform at VMware, and Dave Brown, vice president of AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), highlighted the usage growth of VMware Cloud on AWS since it was first introduced in late 2016. VMware Cloud on AWS is a managed service that lets VMware customers run their vSphere environments on the AWS cloud.
As of June, the number of hosts running on the service has more than doubled year over year, and the number of virtual machines more than tripled, according to the executives. A robust partner ecosystem has also sprung up around the product: Partners have developed over 300 solutions around VMware Cloud on AWS, and over 500 of them have earned the VMware Cloud on AWS service competency.
Currently, VMware Cloud on AWS is available on 17 of AWS' 24 regions. A slide shown during the briefing outlined typical use cases for the service, with 29 percent of customers using it for datacenter migrations, 21 percent for disaster recovery and 20 percent for application migrations. Other uses cases include datacenter expansion and virtual desktop infrastructure.
Over the past four years, VMware and AWS have been "working closely together at a deep technical level" to improve VMware Cloud on AWS and increase its value to their joint customers, Lohmeyer said during the briefing. He and Brown shared five new enhancements aimed at expanding the service's customer base and environments.
- i3en.metal Instance Type: This new instance type is designed for workloads with high storage and performance requirements, such as datacenter migrations. Compared to the i3 instance type, the i3en.metal instance costs 48 percent less per GB while offering four times the storage capacity.
- Support for 2-Host Production Cluster with i3.metal Instances: Partners, managed services providers (MSPs) and small businesses can now take advantage of a this new minimum cluster configuration that cuts starting costs by one-third.
- VMware Cloud Director Service: This is a multitenancy option for MSPs, allowing them to support five to 10 times as many customers without increasing their overhead costs.
- Support for Tanzu Kubernetes Grid: "With Tanzu Kubernetes Grid on VMware Cloud on AWS, customers can deploy their SDDC in the cloud, with all the required components needed to architect and scale Kubernetes to fit their needs," the companies said in a press release.
- VMware Transit Connect: Currently in preview and based on the AWS Transit Gateway service, this solution automates connectivity tasks between VMware Cloud on AWS, on-premises environments and AWS virtual private clouds.
"[W]e are accelerating service innovation and broadening access to VMware Cloud on AWS to help more businesses support the demands of a broad range of enterprise applications and use cases, while delivering the best economic value," Lohmeyer said in a prepared statement.