VMware Cloud on AWS

VMware Cloud on AWS – New capabilities to migrate, manage and modernize enterprise workloads

VMware Cloud on AWS delivers a jointly engineered, hybrid cloud service that extends on-premises vSphere environments to a VMware SDDC running on Amazon EC2 elastic, bare-metal infrastructure that is fully integrated as part of AWS. This service fulfills the needs of our customers across cloud migration, data center extension, disaster recovery and next-generation applications – and does that with compelling economics. Further, in our June What’s New Blog Post, we spoke about 3 additional region launches, bringing the availability of VMware Cloud on AWS to a whopping 16 AWS Regions in less than 2 years. What this means is that our customers can leverage the best of both worlds with a mature cloud service that’s operationally and architecturally consistent, in a region of their choice, with compelling economics for their workloads. Read about how VMware Cloud on AWS is helping customers migrate and modernize applications in this press release.

And we are not stopping any time soon – let us look at what’s new with VMware Cloud on AWS and the rich ecosystem that supports it!

What’s new:

Enhanced migration capabilities:

New Migration experience: We are delivering an enhanced Migration experience focused on migrating data centers to VMware Cloud on AWS. The Migration experience will deliver a prescriptive, intuitive and integrated workflow that expedites large-scale, data center-wide migrations to VMware Cloud on AWS. Customers would be guided through the steps of assessing, building and migrating workloads to VMware Cloud on AWS, with relevant tools such as VMware vRealize Network Insight Cloud and VMware HCX and associated documentation such as on-boarding handbooks. The migration process is broken down into 3 stages: Plan, Build, Migrate. Each stage is further divided into individual steps that include links to relevant documentation and tools. At the end of the 3 stages, customers will have successfully created an SDDC and migrated workloads from their on-premises infrastructure to the cloud. Visit the solution experience here.

Key capabilities include:

  • Turn-key migration experience for customer convenience: Plan, build and execute migrations with a single end-to-end workflow, with step-by-step guided migration experience
  • Increased velocity of migrating workloads to VMware Cloud: Leverage relevant tools presented at the right stage of the journey with streamlined documentation to help users understand the VMware Cloud on AWS platform and the migration process, saving time for users.
  • Simplified workflow with end-to-end visibility: Track status of each step of the process, providing visibility into the progress of the migration project. Users do not need to be logged in and can understand the steps to plan, build and execute a migration, however, in order to track the progress of their migration project, they will need to log in and have a VMware Cloud on AWS organization as they work through the steps.

VMware HCX new capabilities: VMware HCX provides large-scale migration and multi-site hybrid connectivity for VMware Cloud on AWS. New enhancements include:

  • Ability to migrate across SDDCs: Using HCX, customers will be able to migrate, extend and connect different VMware Cloud on AWS SDDCs running in different AWS Regions. By providing the ability to extend networks between regions, it also enables consistency of policies and configurations
  • Logical grouping of VMs for migrations: With this capability, customers will be able to create VM groups based on parameters such as name, type of VMs, subnets/port groups and define migration schedules based on groups.
  • Increased resiliency in hybrid interconnectivity: This feature will enable network flows to be split across multiple Layer 3 tunnels giving customers resiliency in case the underlying network links or equipment fails.
  • Health dashboard for VMware HCX: Customers will be able to view the health and status of HCX services with intuitive, visual logs and alerts to enable easier troubleshooting.

Scale and management enhancements:

  • Elastic vSAN support for storage capacity scaling: In my previous blog post, I had spoken about VMware Elastic vSAN. For customers with high-storage capacity intensive environments, VMware Cloud on AWS offers SDDCs that enable Elastic vSAN, to reduce overall costs. Elastic vSAN is best suited for workloads with high storage capacity requirements and low to moderate performance requirements. Examples are data warehouses with modest performance requirements where storage capacity consumption grows at a much faster rate than compute capacity needs. With this release, Elastic vSAN will deliver increased flexibility with support for scaling storage capacity up for hosts within an AWS R5.metal cluster post initial deployment. This capability will allow users to add Amazon EBS capacity, in 5,000 GiB increments per host, applied cluster-wide, to R5.metal VMware SDDC clusters after the cluster has been deployed. Note that only scaling up is supported in this release.

New capabilities from VMware operations products to further enhance support for VMware Cloud on AWS:

  • VMware vRealize Network Insight Cloud: In addition to NSX day-2 operations management, VMware Cloud on AWS customers can now use vRealize Network Insight Cloud to map application dependencies to accelerate application migration planning as well as application security planning post-migration. Customers can also now leverage Network Insight to troubleshoot network connectivity issues across virtual machines in VMware Cloud on AWS, vSphere-based private clouds and AWS native environments, optimize network performance to reduce bottlenecks and audit security and network changes over time. Finally, usability enhancements such as a bird’s eye view dashboard of VMware Cloud on AWS and a 30-day free trial deliver quick time to value and ease of adoption.
  • VMware vRealize Operations: VMware vRealize Operations can help VMware Cloud on AWS customers to optimize, plan and scale their hybrid cloud deployments. vRealize Operations provides unified monitoring and troubleshooting across VMware Cloud on AWS and vSphere-based private clouds to accelerate mean time to resolution (MTTR) and decision making. Real-time, machine learning driven capacity analytics provide optimization, rightsizing and reclamation across hybrid cloud, while latest what-if planning scenarios help customers plan migration and decide where to deploy new projects. Key new capabilities planned include automated workload balancing to continuously optimize VMware Cloud on AWS performance, billing analysis to optimize costs and capabilities to monitor compliance of virtual machines running in VMware Cloud on AWS. Read more here.
  • Inclusion of more VMware vRealize Log Insight Cloud capabilities in the core VMware Cloud on AWS service: VMware vRealize Log Insight Cloud (previously known as Log Intelligence) is a VMware cloud service that collects and analyzes log data generated by all resources in your VMware Cloud on AWS environment to centralize log management, accelerate IT troubleshooting, provide deep operational visibility across VMware Cloud on AWS and private cloud environments. Every VMware Cloud on AWS subscription includes certain features focused on audit and diagnostic capabilities. With this announcement, the following additional features are included with the VMware Cloud on AWS subscription: real time and query based alerting; log forwarding to on premises and SaaS destinations, e.g. Splunk, Log Insight, AWS Lambda; log export for offline analysis; metric extraction from log messages; public query APIs; log filtering, tagging and masking and VMware Cloud on AWS audit dashboards. VMware offers additional Log Intelligence features in an add-on subscription with additional capabilities.

Modernize with improved access to ecosystem solutions:

  • VMware Cloud Marketplace support for VMware Cloud on AWS: By leveraging the new VMware Cloud Marketplace, VMware Cloud on AWS customers can now benefit from the ability to discover and enable deployment of a wide range of pre-validated third-party solutions. These solutions solve common customer requirements such as back-up and network security, and include popular open-source packages. Customers can search for, filter through and download a solution’s image directly from VMware Cloud Marketplace™ into their existing vCenter content library, from which they can deploy to the SDDC of their choice. For third-party technology vendors, VMware Cloud Marketplace™ represents an easy way to publish their validated solutions for discovery and use by the global VMware Cloud on AWS customer base. Read more in this blog post. For more information, please visit https://cloud.vmware.com/cloud-marketplace.

Availability

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

Resources

For other information related to VMware Cloud on AWS, here are some more learning resources for you:




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