By Mark Lohmeyer, Vice President, Products, Cloud Platform Business Unit, VMware
Today, VMware and AWS are announcing a strategic partnership that brings the two leaders in Enterprise IT together to deliver a vSphere-based cloud service running on AWS. This service will make it easier for customers to run any application, using a set of familiar software and tools, in a consistent hybrid cloud environment.
The Power of VMware on AWS
Currently in Technology Preview, VMware Cloud on AWS, will bring VMware’s enterprise class Software-Defined Data Center software to the AWS cloud, and will enable customers to run any application across vSphere and VMware Cloud Foundation based private, public and hybrid cloud environments. It will be operated, managed and sold by VMware as an on-demand, elastically scalable service and customers will be able to leverage AWS services such as developer tools, analytics, databases, and more.
This jointly architected service represents a significant investment in engineering, operations, support and sales resources from both companies. Designed to deliver a great customer experience, the service will be optimized to run on next generation, elastic, bare metal AWS infrastructure. VMware Cloud on AWS will be powered by VMware Cloud Foundation™, a unified SDDC platform that integrates VMware vSphere, VMware Virtual SAN™ and NSX™ virtualization technologies, and will provide access to the broad range of AWS services, together with the functionality, elasticity, and security customers have come to expect from the AWS Cloud. This will be backed by an integrated customer support experience. Invite-only betas are expected to start in the beginning of 2017 with availability expected to be in the mid-2017 time-frame.
Customer Benefits
Customers can realize significant benefits from this service that combines the best of VMware and AWS, including:
Best-in-class Hybrid Cloud Capabilities: Enterprise class application performance, reliability, availability and security with the best-in-class VMware technologies, all optimized to run on AWS, the leading public cloud provider.
Operationally consistent with vSphere: With VMware Cloud on AWS, your private data center integrated with the AWS public cloud can be operated using the same vCenter UIs, APIs and CLIs you already know. There’s nothing new to learn, and with vCenter Enhanced Linked Mode, you will have a single pane of glass for managing on-premises and VMware Cloud resources on AWS.
Operated and supported by VMware: The service will be operated, sold and supported by VMware. All software components of the service will be fully certified and supported by VMware.
Seamless integration with AWS Services: Virtual Machines running in this environment will have access to leverage AWS’s broad set of cloud-based services including storage, database, analytics and more. This will enable a new set of solutions only possible with VMware environments co-existing on the same infrastructure as AWS cloud-based services.
Seamless workload portability: Full VM compatibility and total workload portability between the datacenter and the AWS cloud. No complex and time consuming application re-platforming is required. Whether you want to use the cloud as your disaster recovery site, migrate a whole data center, or simply burst to the cloud – you can be confident that your applications will just work.
Elastically scalable: The service will let you scale capacity according to your needs. You can scale capacity up and down by adding or removing hosts.
No patching or upgrades: The service will remove the burden of managing the software patch, update and upgrade lifecycle for the user. Operating “as a service” means that VMware will take responsibility for ensuring that your environment is always up to date. This means more time to focus on what matters to your business.
Subscription-based consumption: Customers will be able to purchase dedicated clusters that combine VMware software and AWS infrastructure, either on-demand or as a subscription service.
If you would like to learn more, please check out additional details at
If you are interested in applying for the beta, please fill out this interest form.
Mark Lohmeyer is Vice President of Products for the Cloud Platform Business Unit at VMware. Mark and his team are responsible for driving the overall product strategy, marketing, and go-to-market activities for the company’s flagship vSphere software platform and VMware’s overall strategy to extend the VMware Software Defined Data Center capabilities to the Public Cloud.
Prior to joining VMware, Mark’s background includes leadership roles in product management, marketing, business development, engineering management, and general management, across a wide range of core IT infrastructure technologies, including storage, networking, computing, and application infrastructure, across both software and hardware.
