• Related: VMware Launches Multicloud Vision with AWS in Forefront

With the launch of “VMware Cloud On AWS”, customers of both VMware and Amazon Web Services can now run their vSphere environments on-premises on the AWS cloud. VMware Cloud on AWS was first announced in a private beta last Oct. It officially launched preview Monday, which coincided with the opening keynote at VMware’s VMworld conference in Las Vegas. VMware Cloud on AWS was initially only available from AWS’ Oregon region. This is under an hourly billing plan. The companies plan to expand access to other AWS regions next fiscal year and introduce one-year and three-year subscription plans. Customers with VMware licenses that are still valid under the Hybrid Loyalty program can receive discounts. You can find more pricing information here. VMware Cloud on AWS leverages Cloud Foundation (Vembeau’s software-defined database platform), to allow organizations to extend their on premises vSphere environments to bare metal AWS infrastructure and access AWS’ full range of services. According to the companies, the integration is seamless and users won’t need to create new tools or processes, rewrite applications or buy new hardware. VMware touts the new solution as a boon to customers who are considering migrating certain applications to the cloud (which by some measures is the majority). It is ideal for those who need to quickly set up test and development environments or expand their existing datacenter capacity. Container workload support and disaster recovery are some of the future capabilities. “VMware and AWS empower enterprise IT and operations teams to increase value to their businesses through the combination VMware enterprise capabilities with the breadth, depth and scale of AWS Cloud capabilities, providing them a platform to run any application,” stated Pat Gelsinger, VMware CEO. Customers can use VMware Cloud on AWS to seamlessly integrate their hybrid cloud. It offers the same architecture, capabilities and operational experience in both their vSphere-based environment on-premises and AWS. [Click on the image to see a larger view.] Overview of VMware Cloud on AWS infrastructure. (Source: AWS/Jeff Barr). Monday’s blog post by Jeff Barr, AWS evangelist, provided more technical details about this offering. It supports custom-sized VMs and runs any OS supported by VMware. Additionally, it makes use of single-tenant bare metal AWS infrastructure so you can move your Windows Server licenses into the cloud. Each SDDC (Software Defined Data Center) is composed of 4-16 instances with 512 GB memory, 36 cores, and 15.2TB of NVMe storage. Clusters are currently running in one AWS Availability Zone (AZ). Support is in the works to support clusters that span multiple AZs. Barr wrote that you can spin up a whole VMware SDDC in just a few hours and scale up or down host capacity in minutes. The NSX networking platform (powered at up to 25 Gbps by the AWS Elastic Networking Adapter) supports multicast traffic, separate networks to manage and compute, and IPSec tunnels to on-premises routers, firewalls, and other devices. Although the service is built on AWS’ platform VMware Cloud on AWS can be sold and supported by VMware as well as its partners. You can find more information about VMware Cloud on AWS here.

Oswald