Writing this article with Emad Younis, Staff Technical Marketing Architect at VMware, it gives us great pleasure to announce VMware Cloud™ on AWS is now available in the AWS London Region. VMware Cloud on AWS is a seamlessly integrated hybrid cloud offering which gives our customers the software-defined data center (SDDC) experience from the leader in private cloud, VMware, running on the leading public cloud provider, AWS. Bringing together the best of VMware and AWS, VMware Cloud on AWS provides customers an operationally consistent and familiar way to run, manage and secure applications in a hybrid cloud with access to a broad range of innovative and comprehensive AWS services and robust disaster protection. This release initiates the global expansion of the service by making it available to our European and multi-national customers. We are working towards expansion to additional European and Asia Pacific regions.
In addition to bringing this service to a new region and marking our global expansion, we are also introducing capabilities to accelerate cloud migration and make hybrid cloud simpler:
• New enterprise capabilities: for higher levels of infrastructure availability for mission critical workloads, improved storage efficiency for high data volume workloads and support for desktop workloads
• Access expansion: with enhanced automation, self-service usability improvements as well as integrations with more AWS services and VMware Cloud services– enabling our customers to accelerate their cloud migration and make hybrid cloud deployments simpler.
• Expansion with choice of partners: expansion of the VMware Partner Network program to enable solution providers, managed service providers (MSPs) and system integrators to deliver the VMware Cloud on AWS advantage to our customers.
In our usual style, let us unpack what this release brings, in addition to bringing the service to AWS EU West (London):
Enterprise capabilities:
Enterprise-class Infrastructure Availability:
• Introducing Stretched Clusters for VMware Cloud on AWS (Preview). Now customers will be able to span a vSphere cluster across multiple AWS availability zones (multi-AZ) when deploying an SDDC. A Stretched cluster for VMware Cloud on AWS consists of common NSX logical networks and a vSAN stretched cluster and fault domain. If an availability zone is unavailable, it’s treated just like a vSphere HA event and workloads are started on the other availability zone. This capability is designed to allow customers to have resiliency for their mission critical applications across availably zones with zero RPO and synchronous replication.
Improved storage efficiency:
• Customers will start to see more space savings and efficiency in their SDDC with vSAN providing native deduplication and compression. vSAN can perform block level deduplication and compression to save storage space. When deduplication and compression are enabled on a vSAN datastore, redundant data within the disk group is reduced. Deduplication removes redundant data blocks, and compression removes additional redundant data within each data block. These techniques work together to reduce the amount of space required to store the data. Data intensive workloads can take advantage of vSAN compression and deduplication to reduce TCO. For e.g., a customer with typical workloads and a 150 TB storage need can save up to $1.2M on VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC cluster over a 3-year period – this would equate to a savings of 40% with improvements in storage efficiency.
Announcing support for desktop workloads in preview:
• VMware Horizon support for VMware Cloud on AWS will be in preview. It will enable customers to flexibly deploy & run virtualized desktop workloads and app services on VMware Cloud on AWS (Preview1). Customers would be able to:
o Easily add and extend on-premises desktop services without buying additional hardware.
o Co-locate virtual desktops or published application (remote desktop session) hosts near latency-sensitive applications in the cloud.
o Leverage elastic capacity as a cost-effective way to protect on-premises Horizon deployments or temporary needs.
o Read about it in the EUC blog here.
Workload migration:
VMware vSphere® vMotion®:
• Between on-premises and VMware Cloud on AWS: Announced in preview back in November 2017, vMotion between on-premises and VMware Cloud on AWS is now available.
• Between hosts across clusters within VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC is also now available.
• Between hosts in a stretched cluster across 2 AWS Availability Zones is in Preview.
Access expansion:
Developer Center Automation: The developer center is integrated into the VMware Cloud on AWS service console giving automation experts, DevOps engineers and developers a central portal to gain access to detailed API information, Software Development Kits, Code Samples and command line interfaces
• Easily learn and execute the VMware Cloud on AWS Service RESTful APIs with the Interactive API Explorer
• Customers can quickly integrate their workflows and partner solutions with VMware and community code samples for common development languages
• The Open Source software development kits (SDK’s) and links to getting started guides and documentation will provide a better developer experience to VMware Cloud features
• Automation experts and DevOps engineers can seamless tie their business workflows into VMware Cloud with a selection of command line interfaces.
• Learn more by reading Kyle Ruddy’s blog
Infrastructure as code automation:
• AWS CloudFormation and Hashicorp Terraform integrations: Introduce automated VMware SDDC-level provisioning using popular and familiar DevOps tools.
Enhancements in usability and hybrid management, making hybrid cloud deployments simpler:
• Introducing tools for accelerating initial networking configuration and improving ongoing operations for networking and security
• Expand single logical view with Hybrid Linked Mode (HLM) with on-premises support for vCenter Server 6.0 Update3
Integrations with VMware Cloud services to accelerate cloud migration and enable proactive troubleshooting: announcing support for two VMware cloud services
• VMware Log Intelligence support: Real-time visibility into infrastructure audit logs and application logs for faster troubleshooting.
• VMware Cost Insight support: Plan your migration to VMware Cloud on AWS with cost visibility
Expansion with choice of trusted partners
VMware believes in providing customers choice and to that extent VMware is also expanding its Solution and Cloud Provider Programs to include VMware Cloud on AWS so that your trusted partners can offer you the benefits of a seamless hybrid cloud along with value-added services. For additional details on our partner program announcements, please go to VMware Partner Central (log-in required for VPN partners), or visit www.vmware.com/partners.
Continued broadening of 3rd party technology partner solutions:
The VMware Cloud on AWS ecosystem continues to broaden with more partners validating their solutions work with this service. Some highlights include addition of a new data protection bundle from Dell EMC, as well as addition of partners for in storage performance optimization, data services, cloud planning and more. Learn more about our ISV partner ecosystem here.
Customer momentum and feature velocity:
VMware Cloud on AWS continues to attract large interest from customers. Today, a broad range of customers of all sizes and across all industries including healthcare, media & entertainment, transportation, financial services, manufacturing, oil & gas, government, education, professional services, and technology are actively using the service. Cloud migration (ranging from a single application to data center wide move), Data center extension (whether to satisfy cyclical capacity or extend the datacenter’s footprint) and Disaster Recovery (whether to replace legacy or implement new protection) are popular use-cases.
And once again this is just the beginning. In 2017, VMware and AWS have completed two releases of VMware Cloud on AWS, delivering the service in AWS US East (N. Virginia) and AWS US West (Oregon) regions. This announcement marks the third release of this service and what a journey it has been! And yet the journey is still at the beginning – – Stay tuned for more updates..
Resources:
• You can learn more about our service at: https://cloud.vmware.com/vmc-aws
• Follow our release notes on continuing updates here: docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Cloud-on-AWS/0/rn/vmc-on-aws-relnotes.html
• Check out our YouTube channel
• Follow us on Twitter @vmwarecloudaws
Disclaimer – Preview: Feature(s) released in preview to gather feedback. May not be available to all applicable customers or in all AWS regions. The information in this document is for informational purposes only and may not be incorporated into any contract. There is no commitment or obligation that items in ‘Preview’, ‘’Developing’, and ‘Planning’, will become ‘Available’.
Savings calculated for a 150TB VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC cluster. Based on 3-year subscription pricing. Actual deduplication and compression storage reduction will vary based on workload and data set.
