New capabilities revealed for VMware Cloud on AWS
- Date: 23 September, 2020
AWS and VMware have added new capabilities to their joint offering, VMware Cloud on AWS, aimed at expanding the service’s customer base and environments by addressing key issues such as application modernisation and cloud migration, whilst also lowering costs for organisations of all sizes.
It is four years since AWS announced their partnership with VMware, with the aim to enable VMware customers to run their virtualised data centre environments on AWS instances. The resultant VMware Cloud on AWS service, launched in 2017, now supports many types of workloads, including SQL Server migrations, Oracle database migrations and SAP workloads, whilst also allowing customers to scale up capacity during busy times as required and use less resources during quieter times.
Since its launch, AWS and VMware have continued to regularly enhance the service by introducing a range of innovative features. In this blog, we take a look at the key additions included in the latest set of new offerings
- A new i3en.metal instance has been designed for workloads with high storage and performance requirements, such as data centre migrations. Compared to the i3 instance type, it costs almost 50% less per Gigabyte of raw storage and offers four times the storage capacity
- VMware Cloud Director Service is a new multi-tenant cloud management service that will enable managed service provider partners or MSPs to support between five and ten times more customers at no additional cost
- Tanzu Kubernetes Grid is now supported, to enable customers to deploy their software-defined data centre (SDDC) in the cloud, with all the required components needed to architect and scale Kubernetes to fit their needs
- Finally, VMware Transit Connect is a networking tool based on the AWS Transit Gateway service that is currently in preview. This new solution will automate connectivity tasks between VMware Cloud on AWS, on-premises environments and AWS virtual private clouds. It will also deliver improved network connectivity for VMware SD-WAN users at branch offices or remote working sites who want to access workloads deployed on VMware Cloud on AWS
The continued development of new solutions and services for VMware Cloud on AWS is certainly paying off according to AWS, with a 2.5 fold increase in the number of hosts between June 2019 and June 2020 and a 3.5 times jump in the number of VMs running.
Currently, the service is available on 17 of AWS’ 24 regions. Typical use cases for it include 29% of customers for data centre migrations, 21% for disaster recovery and 20% for application migrations.
David Brown, vice president, EC2, at AWS, highlighted the importance of the service to both companies, saying: “Customers want cloud services that are available anywhere they operate in the world, can deliver real business value and financial savings, and support their needs instantly as priorities change. We are delighted to be working with VMware to allow customers to build and operate applications in AWS regions, using the same foundation they use in their data centres today, which is why VMware Cloud on AWS is our preferred service for all vSphere-based workloads”.
