Moving to the Public Cloud: Six Steps for Success
When it comes to enterprise IT deployed on premise, VMware still rules the roost. But it’s also apparent that many of these IT organizations would like to extend the reach of VMware into clouds other than the ones directly affiliated with VMware.
With that goal in mind, Ravello Systems this week announced the general availability of InceptionSX, a technology that takes advantage of nested hypervisors to enable instances of VMware ESXi hypervisors to be deployed on Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. An added set of tools, InfinityDC, enables IT organizations to manage those clouds from within the VMware vCenter management console.
Ravello Systems CEO Rami Tamir says the company’s HVX nested hypervisor has already been tested by 1,250 VMware users, with more than one million ESXi CPU hours run. VMware applications that have proven to be compatible include vSphere, vCenter, NSX, VSAN and vRealize Operations software, as well as third-party products from Catalogic, Actifio, Veeam, vArmour, NetApp, EMC, Infinio and Nexenta, says Tamir. Delivered as a service, the pricing for the Ravello offering starts at $0.14 per hour.
To make it simpler to manage all the distributed complexity, InfinityDC, a plugin for VMware vCenter, allows enterprises to spin up an isolated capsule in either AWS or Google Cloud in which they can run as many VMware ESXi nodes as they need. Tamir says that this approach allows IT organizations that have standardized on VMware vCenter to take advantage of the economics of public clouds such as AWS and Google Cloud, which operate at Web scale.
The degree to which IT organizations that have standardized on VMware will want to use those public clouds as an alternative to the VMware vCloud Air service will vary. But for many of them that are cost sensitive, there should be a certain amount of comfort in having the option.
