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VMware Cloud on AWS: Get your basics right: Part 1

By Sonali Desai, Product Marketing Manager

You can read the next parts in this blog series here: Part 2, Part 3

As a product marketer, I am fortunate that I get a chance to talk to customers and partners at multiple events and conferences so that I can understand their perspectives about the product, what they want to learn, what is their organizational strategy and where our product fits in their strategy. After having multiple conversations and feedback from the customers, I am starting off this blog series that explains Basics about VMware Cloud on AWS

So, Let’s begin.

Introduction to hybrid cloud:

Customers have been using their on-premises infrastructure for years, but in today’s digital transformation era, they are forced to innovate and build modern infrastructure. In order to do that, they are leaning toward the public cloud to leverage the benefits in terms of scalability, cost savings, innovation etc. But at the same time, they want to keep their on-premises infrastructure and reap the benefits of both the worlds. Hybrid cloud infrastructures helps them by removing the silos and integrating their on-premises infrastructure with the public cloud.

What are the typical challenges in adopting hybrid cloud?

  • Different infrastructures between private cloud and public cloud, forcing them to rearchitect / refactor their existing on-premises applications when they move to cloud
  • Inability to leverage existing IT skillsets and tools when adopting hybrid cloud
  • Differences in operational models and inability to leverage established on-premises governance, security and operational policies while taking advantage of cloud scale and agility
  • Lack of flexibility when strategically determining where to run your applications, due to a lack of application portability and compatibility. This reduces agility in serving business needs, and also increases costs

For more detail, check out our guide that talks about ‘Top 5 challenges customers face when they consider migrating to cloud.

How VMware Cloud on AWS helps you overcome these challenges and accelerate your hybrid cloud journey:

  • It provides you operational consistency between your on-premises and cloud environment
  • There is no need for application refactoring or re-architecture when migrating to cloud
  • You can use same managements tools and skillsets that you were using on-premises, so there is no need to re-train staff
  • You can leverage established on-premises enterprise security, governance and operational policies

What is VMware Cloud on AWS?


VMware Cloud on AWS brings VMware’s enterprise-class SDDC software to the AWS Cloud, and enables customers to run production applications across VMware vSphere®-based private, public and hybrid cloud environments, with optimized direct access to AWS services. It integrates VMware vSphere, VMware vSAN and VMware NSX along with VMware vCenter management and optimizes it to run on dedicated, elastic, Amazon EC2 bare-metal infrastructure that is fully integrated as part of the AWS Cloud. Please note, this is not a nested virtualization, but it is VMware SDDC software stack running on AWS’s bare metal infrastructure. This service is delivered, sold and supported by VMware and its partner community.

Where is the service available today?

VMware Cloud on AWS is available across multiple regions in US, Europe and Asia-Pacific. Today it is available across 10 regions: AWS Asia Pacific (Tokyo), AWS Europe (Ireland), AWS US West (N. California), and AWS US East (Ohio) , AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney), AWS US East (N. Virginia), AWS US West (Oregon), AWS EU (London), AWS EU (Frankfurt) and AWS GovCloud (US West).

We have accelerated our regional roll-out to 3-4 regions per quarter and we are planning to make the service available across many more regions over the next year.

What are the typical use cases for using VMware Cloud on AWS?


When we talked to our customers, we identified four main use cases where customers want to use this service in order to adopt hybrid cloud:

  1. Cloud Migration
  2. Data Center Extension
  3. Disaster Recovery
  4. Next-generation applications

Let’s understand what the typical scenarios under each of these use cases are:

  1. Cloud Migration:

Migrate your existing on-premises applications and workloads to the cloud.

Typical Scenarios:

  • Application-specific migration: Customers want to move specific applications to the cloud due to specific business needs e.g. They want to move tier 2 and tier 3 applications to the cloud, while keeping the majority of their tier 1 applications on-premises
  • Data center wide evacuations: Customers want to consolidate data centers and move completely to the public cloud, may be because their co-lo facility lease is going to get expired soon or there is an executive mandate for cloud adoption
  • Infrastructure refreshes: Customers are doing infrastructure refreshes (e.g., due to hardware end-of-life, infrastructure software upgrade etc.) and want to leverage the opportunity to move to the public cloud
  1. Data Center Extension:

Extend your on-premises data center to the cloud as per your business needs.

Typical Scenarios:

  • Footprint expansion:
  • Customers have geographic capacity needs (such as data sovereignty rules or the need to be closer to their end users) and do not want to invest in building out a new data center
  • Customers need capacity for new projects without having to invest in over-provisioning or building new capacity on-premises
  • On-demand capacity:
  • Customers have capacity constraints on-premises to handle seasonal spikes in demand
  • Customers want to handle unplanned temporary capacity needs
  • Test/Dev: Customers have a need to perform test and development activities in a cloud environment that is operationally similar to on-premises environments
  1. Disaster Recovery:

Disaster recovery, delivered as a service for VMware Cloud on AWS, provides on-demand site protection with native automated orchestration, failover and failback capabilities.

Typical scenarios:

  • New DR: Customers want to implement a DR solution for the first time
  • Replace Existing DR: Customers want to reduce their secondary DR site costs by moving DR operations to the cloud or by modernizing existing DR solutions
  • Complement Existing DR: Customers want to protect additional workloads with a cloud-based DR solution for specific applications
  1. Next-Gen Applications:

Build next generation applications by integrating with native cloud services.

Typical Scenarios:

  • Application Modernization: Customers want to modernize their existing on-premises applications by integrating with native AWS services across AI, ML, IoT, Analytics and many more other areas
  • New Application build-out: Customers want to build new applications in the cloud by accessing native AWS services
  • Hybrid Applications: Customers want to build hybrid applications that talk to on-premises infrastructure as well as leverage cloud services

Hear directly from our customers about how they successfully implemented their use cases rapidly and without any risk with VMware Cloud on AWS.

This is just a brief introduction to VMware Cloud on AWS. In the next set of blogs in this series, I will dive deeper into each of the use cases and give more technical details about features and capabilities of the service.

If you want to hear more about the cloud migration use case we have an upcoming webinar: ‘Deep Dive: Accelerate Your Cloud Migration with VMware Cloud on AWS’.

REGISTER NOW and ride onto your cloud migration journey!

Meanwhile, if you want to check out some resources to learn more about VMware Cloud on AWS, see below:

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