VMware on AWS (re:Invent) update

At VMworld 2017 in Barcelona, VMware announced the availability of VMware on AWS. At AWS re:Invent 2017 in November in Las Vegas, VMware and AWS announced the expansion of the availability of VMware on AWS. It is now available in U.S. West (Oregon) region and in the AWS U.S. East (N. Virginia) region.  Also immediately available are new one- and three-year subscription options. Previously, the only billing option for the product was by the hour. VMware is also offering discounts to customers with existing on-premises licenses for its vSphere, NSX and vSAN products. Next to to this announcement there were several different other announcements made. Below is a list of same of the announcements. Faster Application Migration with Seamless Portability VMware Cloud on AWS customers have the ability to choose where to run their workloads based on their business needs. A new capability expected by early 2018 will let customers migrate their applications from their on-premises VMware environments to VMware Cloud on AWS without having to reconfigure their network or experiencing any disruptions. With VMware vSphere® vMotion®, new L2 stretched networking features, and AWS Direct Connect, customers will be able to migrate applications from their on premises VMWare cluster into VMware on AWS without any disruptions to the application, and without having to make any changes to the network configuration. Customers will also be able also use AWS Direct Connect for high-speed, reliable, and private network connectivity, supporting faster cold and live application migration with vMotion. VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension™, an add-on SaaS offering for VMware Cloud on AWS, will provide large-scale migration between on-premises environments running vSphere 5.0+ and VMware Cloud on AWS with no replatforming, retesting, or change in tooling. Hybrid Cloud Extension will provide built in high performance Layer 2 extensions so customers will be able to keep the same networks, IP, and routing policies in place while moving workloads. This eliminates the need for extensive application dependency mapping when migrating applications to VMware Cloud on AWS. It also includes high performance Layer 2 extensions, data synchronization, traffic analysis, WAN optimizations, and built-in IPsec VPN connectivity that will enable secure, efficient, and effective cloud migration with no impact to application uptime. Read more about Hybrid Cloud Extension service for VMware Cloud on AWS in this blog. Application Availability and Business Continuity for Mission-Critical Workloads VMware Site Recovery™, a new service for VMware Cloud on AWS customers, delivers protection between customer data centers and VMware Cloud on AWS, or between environments running in separate AWS Availability Zones (AZs). With VMware Site Recovery, customers can lower capital expenditures by eliminating the need for a secondary disaster recovery site, streamline operations with automated orchestration, enable failover and failback with familiar management tools, and increase disaster readiness with non-disruptive, on-demand testing available anytime. Benefits of VMware Site Recovery include:

• Accelerate time-to-protection: Remove the need to build a secondary DR site and implement DR in a day with familiar tools and the same operating environment from on-premises to the public cloud
• Simplify DR operations: Streamline operations with automated failover and failback and simplify ongoing maintenance and non-disruptive testing
• Apply Cloud Economics: Reduce secondary site management costs with cloud-managed infrastructure and only pay for what you use with granular, on-demand cloud pricing

VMware Site Recovery is available today as a separate add-on and is priced per protected VM with hourly metering. Scale, Security, and Visibility for Mission-Critical Applications VMware and AWS are expanding the scale, network connectivity, and security capabilities of VMware Cloud on AWS to further support the most resource intensive applications such as Oracle, Oracle RAC, Microsoft SQL Server, Apache Spark and Hadoop. VMware Cloud on AWS supports 32 host clusters and multiple software-defined data centers (SDDC) per organization today, and will support 10 clusters per SDDC soon. This will enable a single customer to support environments as large as tens of thousands of VMs. Customer SDDC environments run on a high-performance, dedicated, and highly secure next-generation AWS hardware infrastructure. For application teams, VMware is adding support for Wavefront® by VMware, a VMware Cloud Service that allows customers to visualize, alert upon, and troubleshoot applications running on VMware Cloud on AWS. Wavefront by VMware provides an open API platform supporting more than 80 integrations to collect time-series data from application metrics collectors such as for Java, Ruby, Python, and Go, to service metrics collectors for MySQL, Pivotal, Kubernetes, AWS, and more. Also AWS is introducing services that can run local on VMware vSphere. First of the services is AWS Greengrass.  AWS Greengrass is software that extends AWS cloud capabilities to local devices, making it possible for them to collect and analyze data closer to the source of information, while also securely communicating with each other on local networks. More specifically, developers who use AWS Greengrass can author serverless code (AWS Lambda functions) in the cloud and conveniently deploy it to devices for local execution of applications. With AWS Greengrass fo vSphere these capabilities also become available in your own datacenter.  More info about this can be found in this blog. The partner eco system around VMware Cloud on AWS is also expanding. For an overview of the current partners, you can go to this link

I think that the services offering around VMware Cloud on AWS will expand in the next years and that both companies will add additional services and capabilities to the current offering. Personally I'm looking forward to the availability of VMC-AWS in the Europe region as it will help a lot of current VMware customers in the move to the cloud.