VMware Advances AWS Hybrid Cloud Agenda

Now that instances of VMware running on Amazon Web Services (AWS) that are managed directly by VMware are becoming more widely available, more attention is being paid to providing tools to migrate existing workloads from on-premises environments into VMware Cloud on AWS.

VMware and AWS at the AWS re:Invent 2017 conference today announced VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension, a set of tools made available as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering that takes advantage of VMware NSX network virtualization software running on-premises and in AWS to create a Layer 2 network spanning both environments. That capability then makes it possible to more easily employ VMware vMotion and AWS Direct Connect virtual private networks (VPN) to migrate workloads in the AWS cloud without having to refactor them.

Ivan Oprencak, director of product marketing at VMware, says this latest offering is designed to make it simpler to migrate a lot of VMware workloads at once.

“It addresses bulk migration of workloads,” says Oprencak.

At the same time, VMware unfurled today VMware Site Recovery, a disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) offering that makes it possible to automatically spin up applications running on AWS in the event of a disruption to an on-premises environment. Like VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension, the SaaS offering relies on VMware NSX to be installed in both environments. VMware also revealed that Wavefront by VMware, a monitoring service VMware acquired in earlier this year, now supports VMware Cloud on AWS.

VMware announced that VMware Cloud on AWS can now support up to 32 host clusters per software-defined data center (SDDC) instance, which can be now be licensed for as long as three years. Finally, VMware announced that VMware Cloud AWS, now generally available in both AWS east and west regions in the U.S., is now offering discounts as high as 25 percent to customers that installed VMware software locally.  Oprencak says regardless of contract type, the unit of service being consumed will be virtual machines consumed on an hourly basis per month.

The latest additions to the VMware on AWS cloud portfolio indicate VMware is making steady progress on a hybrid cloud computing strategy that now depends heavily on AWS to execute. VMware has existing cloud partnerships with IBM and a few smaller cloud service providers. But the AWS partnership spans the entire VMware software portfolio. As such, it’s a crucial element of a VMware hybrid cloud strategy that is intended to counter rival Microsoft and Google initiatives that ultimately seek to limit VMware to the realm of being just another provider of commercial hypervisor technology.