Migrate to the Cloud

VMware Cloud on AWS expands across Europe and the U.S.

In August this year, VMware Cloud on AWS turned one, and with that we announced a slew of capabilities to accelerate enterprise cloud migration projects.

Today at VMworld Europe 2018, we are excited to announce our service expansions in Europe and the United States with new regions forthcoming in AWS Europe (Ireland), US West (N. California) and US East (Ohio). In addition, we are delivering new capabilities that enable our customers to protect, secure and run enterprise applications with confidence.

Let us jump right in:

Expanding to multiple AWS regions across Europe and the U.S.:

With our service coming to AWS Europe (Ireland), US West (N. California) and US East (Ohio) in addition the five global regions where the service is already available, we are accelerating the roll out of the service to meet the infrastructure needs of our regional and multi-national customers – be it cloud migration, data center extension or disaster recovery to a region where their business operates in. This roll out plan follows the announcements that Pat Gelsinger and Andy Jassy made during VMworld US 2018.

Protecting your infrastructure and applications:

Customers want assurance that their workloads are protected. Should anything happen, be it a hardware failure or a natural disaster, customers want to quickly recovery their environment and continue with business operations.

VMware Site Recovery for VMware Cloud on AWS provides customers “DR in a Day” with cloud economics. With this cloud-based disaster recovery as a service solution, we empower customers to expand and simplify disaster recovery operations with on-demand workload protection built on proven VMware orchestration, automation, and replication technologies. VMware Site Recovery enables customers to take advantage of flexible protection topologies including between VMware Cloud on AWS and on-premises and between VMware Cloud on AWS environments. In addition, customers can leverage non-disruptive testing and generate comprehensive reports for DR compliance. Customers can also optimize the resource management of their DR clusters after fail-over by leveraging automated cluster scaling with Elastic DRS. Here is what’s new with this service:

  • Larger scale: In order to help customers protect larger environments, VMware is announcing that VMware Site Recovery will double in scale to protect up to 1000VMs per SDDC.
  • New customer promotion: In order to help customers get started with this DRaaS offering, VMware is offering a special time-bound promotion with free VMware Site Recovery add-on for up to 90 days for a maximum of 200 VMs – terms and conditions apply. Please visit our website for more details.
  • Hybrid cloud DR with Dell EMC VxRAIL and VMware Site Recovery: The Dell EMC VxRail™ appliance family with VMware Site Recovery protection enables customers to extend protection of their on-premises VMware environment to the cloud on VMware Cloud on AWS. Customers get simplified disaster recovery operations in the cloud through on-demand workload protection provided by VMware Site Recovery. Quickly setup, test, and fail-over from on-premises VxRail appliances to the cloud on-demand in the event of a disaster, at the push of a button. In addition, customers using Dell EMC VxRail on premises benefit from the operational consistency of VMware vSAN Hyper-converged Infrastructure solution that powers both VxRail and VMware Cloud on AWS.

Learn all about what’s new with VMware Site Recovery by reading this blog.

 

Securing your infrastructure and applications:

Customers are always looking to optimize the way they safeguard their business and secure their infrastructure and applications. VMware Cloud on AWS provides a robust and hardened cloud infrastructure with rich security features built-in. Several capabilities that were announced in preview are now available:

Secure all data with native, software-based vSAN encryption for data at rest with AWS Key Management Service (KMS) is now available: Customers can now take advantage of built-in vSAN encryption with AWS Key Management Service. This enables encryption of data at rest with AWS’s managed service for creating and controlling the encryption keys. All data in VMware Cloud on AWS is encrypted at no additional cost.

Application-centric Security and Micro-Segmentation with VMware NSX is now available: VMware NSX now enables powerful, yet simple micro-segmentation policies, providing granular control over east-west traffic between application workloads running in a VMware Cloud on AWS utilizing distributed firewalls (DFW). Security policies are dynamically enforced at the VM-level, enabling organizations to prevent threats from spreading across the network. Administrators can define policies based on workload attributes (e.g., VM names, OS versions) and user-defined tags. These security policies will follow the workloads wherever they are moved inside VMware Cloud on AWS, providing increased operational simplicity compared to traditional IP-based firewall rules.

Distributed Firewall and Edge Firewall Logging: VMware NSX now enables customers to configure logging for specific firewall rules defined on the edge or distributed firewalls. In conjunction with VMware Log Intelligence, customers can now analyze and troubleshoot application flows through visibility into packets matching specific NSX firewall rules.

Granular network visibility for monitoring, security, and troubleshooting with flow and packet level visibility is now available: IPFIX provides flow-level visibility and port mirroring provides packet-level visibility across all VMs running on an overlay network inside the SDDC. Flow and packet data can be consumed by third-party tools for application performance monitoring, security analysis, and troubleshooting.

New compliance certifications: VMware is committed to delivering a cloud service that meets a comprehensive set of international and industry-specific security and compliance standards. VMware adheres to very rigorous security development and operational standards and is actively conducting third-party audits in order to expand the list of certifications, attestations and adoptions of frameworks. The service is already ISO 27001, ISO 27017, ISO 27018, HIPAA, SOC 1/2/3 compliant. Latest addition to this list are SOC 1/2 Type 2 reports which demonstrate the design and testing of SOC 1 and 2 controls over a period of time.

Running enterprise apps with confidence:

Customers want a cloud service that can support the demands of a broad range of enterprise workloads as they implement their cloud strategy. They want to make sure their existing IT infrastructure is connected and integrated with the cloud service, with easy migration capabilities. The infrastructure supporting these workloads need to have the scale, performance, and availability to meet the most stringent demands.

Fast, dedicated connection with VMware NSX / AWS Direct Connect Integration: This capability that was previously announced in preview is now available. VMware Cloud on AWS customers can now leverage AWS Direct Connect for management appliance and workload traffic, eliminating the need for separate VPN tunnels for this traffic. This feature is very helpful with traffic-heavy workloads that they either need to migrate or operate in a hybrid manner. Key capabilities include high bandwidth, low latency connectivity for all traffic types, dynamic advertisement of NSX logical networks and management networks over AWS Direct Connect Private VIF and optional IPSec VPN for encrypted traffic. Further, for VPN-based connectivity, new enhancements reduce complexity for networking across sites while improving performance and resiliency. Key capabilities include simplified VPN deployment – dynamic route sharing via BGP, dual-homed tunnels across unique VPN endpoints enable inter-site resiliency and accelerated throughput and performance for IPsec tunnel traffic using DPDK technology.

Enhanced Virtual Desktop support: Horizon 7 for VMware Cloud on AWS delivers a seamlessly integrated hybrid cloud for virtual desktops and applications. With Horizon 7.7, customers can now leverage just-in-time provisioning of virtual desktops and applications on VMware Cloud on AWS – instant clones, App Volumes and User Environment Management. What this means is that customers can spin up virtual desktops at an average rate of 1-2 seconds/desktop versus what would normally take hours. Instant clones share a base image, which means storage consumption by these clones is also reduced significantly. Finally, rolling desktop patching as user logs off, eliminates maintenance window associated desktop patching operation.

In order to improve operations with consolidated hybrid management of Horizon 7 virtual desktops and applications on VMware Cloud on AWS, VMware is also announcing integration of Horizon Cloud service with Horizon 7 on VMware Cloud on AWS. This will provide unified visibility, system health monitoring and helpdesk services for Horizon 7 deployments, both on-premises and on VMware Cloud on AWS. This is the first step in a journey to transform Horizon 7 on VMware Cloud on AWS to a cloud service model putting powerful management and automation tools at the fingertips of the administrator. Learn what’s new with Horizon on VMware Cloud on AWS by reading this blog post.

Finally, VMware Cloud on AWS is also Citrix Ready. What this means is that customers can run Citrix Virtual Desktops and Apps on VMware Cloud on AWS. Learn more by reading this blog.

Easy migration at scale: VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) provides best-in-class migration capabilities for vSphere workloads with a variety of options that include, cold, bulk and live migrations without re-IP, retrofit or network re-architecture. In effect, it abstracts and removes the boundaries of the underlying infrastructure, focusing on the workloads. Migration to VMware Cloud on AWS at virtually any scale is made simple, fast and efficient. We are excited to announce that VMware Cloud Motion with vSphere Replication, a capability that enables for live migration of thousands of VMs with zero downtime, with scheduled cut over is now available. This enables our customers to perform data center scale evacuations without disrupting mission-critical applications. If you want to learn more about HCX, you must read Emad Younis’s blog.

Unified in-product support experience: Providing a high-value technical support experience is something that is crucial to making our customers successful. We are now introducing the unified support experience that brings together intelligent search, chat support, service request management, community help and service health visibility – all from within the VMware Cloud on AWS console. For more information, please read this blog post.

 

Expanding ecosystem of over 100+ technology solutions validated with VMware Cloud on AWS

One of the really great benefits of VMware Cloud on AWS is that technology solutions that our customers have built their infrastructure on, continue to work with the industry-defining hybrid cloud service. We have been working with our VMware Technology Alliance Partners to test and validate solutions in cloud migration, data protection, DevOps, security, networking, key management system and many more categories – over 100+ technology solutions have been validated to work with VMware Cloud on AWS to date. To learn more about our joint solutions on VMware Cloud on AWS, please visit the VMware Solution Exchange. If you are a partner and would be interested in validating your solution, email [email protected].

Customer adoption:

Within just over a year after the launch of the service, it is great to see the adoption and interest by customers across different industries. Customers are seeing the value in how VMware Cloud on AWS has made their hybrid cloud transformation journey smooth and seamless. Here are just couple of examples to give you some idea about these success stories:

Stagecoach:

Stagecoach, the UK’s largest bus and coach operator transforms its approach to IT by moving to VMware Cloud On AWS. Their production applications are migrated to VMware Cloud on AWS in less than 3 weeks! Learn more about their story here and read about their use case here.

TrendMicro:

TrendMicro used utilizing VMware Cloud on AWS to accelerate migration of workloads to public cloud, saving months of time and reducing OpEx. Their IT team is leveraging VMware Cloud on AWS to quickly migrate workloads to the public cloud with on-demand expansion and no impact to application uptime. Read more about their story here.

Get started now

  1. You have the option of proving the value of VMware Cloud on AWS with our Single Host SDDC offering for non-production environments – for effective price of as low as $5.60/hour! As a reminder, the Single Host SDDC offering is time-bound to 30-day intervals and is designed for customers who want to prove the value of VMware Cloud on AWS in their environments be it for migrating to the cloud, extending your data center or modernizing your applications with native AWS services. Get started now by clicking here.
  2. You can also get started with the 3-host configuration for production environments for the effective price of 2 hosts for a limited time. Click here to learn more.

Availability

To view the latest status of features for VMware Cloud on AWS, visit: https://cloud.vmware.com/vmc-aws/roadmap.

Resources:

Related Articles