Additional details on VMware Cloud on AWS

Today VMware announced a great new partnership: VMware Cloud will be available on Amazon Web Services as a vSphere based cloud service. This will bring VMware’s enterprise level SDDC technology straight to the Amazon cloud. Read the full announcement in the official blog post. In this article I will share some additional details on this new offering.

This new partnership will bring you best of two worlds: you can mix and match VMware Cloud on AWS with existing AWS services such as EC2, S3 and RDS.

What you probably want to know: ESXi will not run nested on AWS, this is full blown vSphere offering, providing a full VMware experience. VMware will bring vSphere, NSX and Virtual SAN to AWS. This will bring some compelling features to the Amazon cloud:

• Running vSphere VM’s on the AWS cloud, no conversion required;
• Enterprise shared storage services using Virtual SAN, including all flash performance;
• Simple and cost effective DR options;
• Stretched network across clouds (this is really cool and currently not provided by Amazon or Azure) and micro segmentation;
• vCenter Server is used for the management.

The service is sold as-a-service from VMware. This means VMware will do standard maintenance task for you, VMware will apply all the patches and upgrade the infrastructure if required. You, as a customer, can just consume the vSphere resources.

The get an idea of how this will look like, I have a nice screenshot to share with you:

In this example you see both an on-premises data center (in Palo Alto) and a as-a-service datacenter on AWS. Just one interface (the new HTML5 vCenter interface), displaying both vSphere environments. The resize option in the pop-up menu illustrates the ability to dynamically upscale your cloud based vSphere environment.

Using VMware Cloud on AWS is a three step process:

1. Start with the Service Console – An administrative portal for Cloud Data Center (CDC) provisioning and billing. The Service Console provides a HTML5 UI and a RESTful API for automatic provisioning and scaling;
2. The Cloud Data Center – The CDC includes a pre-configured environment containing vSphere, NSX and Virtual SAN. Capacity can be allocated dynamically leveraging DRS technology.Capacity is based on x86 technology, all flash Virtual SAN and 10 Gbps networking;
3. Deploy across regions – You can deploy this new service throughout the world leveraging available AWS regions/zones.

Scenarios you can think of is maintain/extend your current vSphere environment, consolidate and migrate vSphere to AWS or consume resources when you need them. Betas of this new offering will start beginning of 2017, GA is expected mid 2017.

I think this is a great announcement just before VMworld Europe which takes place next week in Barcelona. I am sure more details will follow next week, stay tuned to learn more.

Note that the provided information is subject to change because the product is still under development.