Today at VMworld 2018 in Las Vegas, VMware Inc. announced that is was expanding its popular VMware Cloud on AWS to the Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Asia Pacific (Sydney) region. This expands the reach of VMware Cloud on AWS to nearly all the way around the globe. VMware is also announcing several new updates and capabilities for the service with the aim of rapidly migrating applications and data centers to a secure cloud service that meets enterprise application needs.
Today at VMworld 2018 in Las Vegas, VMware Inc. announced that is was expanding its popular VMware Cloud on AWS to the Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Asia Pacific (Sydney) region. This expands the reach of VMware Cloud on AWS to nearly all the way around the globe. VMware is also announcing several new updates and capabilities for the service with the aim of rapidly migrating applications and data centers to a secure cloud service that meets enterprise application needs.
As we’ve previously stated, VMware Cloud on AWS allows customers to use VMware tools that they already know to continue managing their applications while leveraging several of the benefits of AWS including compute, databases, analytics, Internet of Things (IoT), security, mobile, deployment, application services, and more. VMware customers looking to migrate to the public cloud, need look no farther than VMware Cloud on AWS. Not only does it support the ability to develop entirely new applications, extend the capacity of data centers for existing applications, or quickly provision development and test environments, it also supports containerized workloads and DevOps services. Now even more regions will be able to take advantage of these benefits.
Updates and capabilities include:
- 50 percent lower entry-level price and new minimum configuration: VMware will reduce the entry price for VMware Cloud on AWS by 50 percent and offer a smaller 3-host minimum SDDC configuration as a starting point for production workloads. For a limited time, VMware will offer the 3-Host SDDC environment for the cost of a 2-Host configuration.
- License optimization for enterprise applications (Oracle/Microsoft): with new custom CPU core count capabilities, customers will be able to specify just the number of CPU cores they need, reducing the cost of running mission-critical applications that are licensed per CPU core. With VM-Host Affinity, customers will be able to pin workloads to a specific host group to support licensing requirements.
- Instant Data Center evacuation with live migration of 1000’s of VMs: customers will be able to live migrate thousands of VMs with zero downtime, and schedule exactly when to cutover to the new cloud environment with VMware NSX Hybrid Connect (previously known as VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension) powered by vMotion and vSphere Replication. VMware is offering a free migration cost assessment with VMware Cost Insight to assist with cloud migration planning.
- New high-capacity storage option, backed by Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS): Customers will be able to independently scale compute and storage resource requirements, and reduce costs for storage-capacity demanding workloads with new clusters for storage-dense environments. These clusters deliver scalable storage capabilities with VMware vSAN utilizing Amazon Elastic Block Storage, and run on new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) R5.metal instances. Amazon EC2 R5.metal instances are based on 2.5 GHz Intel Platinum 8000 series (Skylake-SP) processors. Each host has two sockets, 48 cores, 96 hyper-threads, 768 GB RAM, and 25 Gbps network bandwidth.
- Application-centric security with VMware NSX: Customers will gain granular control over east-west traffic between workloads running in VMware Cloud on AWS through micro-segmentation provided by NSX. Security policies can be defined based on workload attributes (e.g., VM names, OS versions) and user-defined tags, are dynamically enforced at the VM-level, and follow workloads wherever they are moved.
- NSX / AWS Direct Connect integration for simplified, high-performance connectivity: This new integration will make it easier for customers to connect across hybrid cloud environments and improve network performance. Integration between NSX and AWS Direct Connect will enable private and consistent connectivity between VMware workloads running on VMware Cloud on AWS and those running on-premises. This integration will also accelerate migration to cloud and enable multi-tier hybrid applications.
- Optimized cost/performance with autoscaling: Elastic DRS allows users to automate VMware Cloud on AWS cluster scaling. Elastic DRS enables automated scaling up or scaling down of hosts and rebalancing of clusters, based on the needs of the applications and the policies the customer defines.
- Real-Time log management included at no additional cost: VMware has added VMware Log Intelligence to the core VMware Cloud on AWS service, providing customers with access to VMware Cloud on AWS audit logs for increased security and compliance at no additional cost.
Availability
Services in the AWS Asia-Pacific (Sydney) region, Elastic DRS, Log Intelligence Service, and Cost Insight Migration Assessment are all available today. The 3-host configuration, Custom CPU core count, VM-Host Affinity, new NSX Hybrid Connect capabilities, EBS support, the Amazon EC2 R5.metal instance type, NSX and AWS Direct Connect integration, and NSX micro-segmentation are in preview.
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