This week, VMware has announced new offerings for its AWS solution platform, addressing the need for more compute, storage, and memory, and for automation and ease of operations. VMware highlights the availability of the i3en.metal, a new bare-metal instance type for VMware Cloud on AWS clusters, and also a new 2-host cluster capability, available only with these instances. The company states that VMware Cloud on AWS environments running on i3en.metal instances aim to address a variety of workloads, including data or storage-intensive workloads requiring high random I/O access such as relational databases, and workloads that require end-to-end security.
This week, VMware has announced new offerings for its AWS solution platform, addressing the need for more compute, storage, and memory, and for automation and ease of operations. VMware highlights the availability of the i3en.metal, a new bare-metal instance type for VMware Cloud on AWS clusters, and also a new 2-host cluster capability, available only with these instances. The company states that VMware Cloud on AWS environments running on i3en.metal instances aim to address a variety of workloads, including data or storage-intensive workloads requiring high random I/O access such as relational databases, and workloads that require end-to-end security.
i3en.metal instances are based on the 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processor, making them ideal for applications like NoSQL databases, distributed file systems, and data warehousing. Each host offers more compute, up to 48 physical CPU cores with hyperthreading, and more RAM, up to 768 GiB RAM. And with storage optimization of VMware vSAN checksum, VMware Cloud on AWS can provide more capacity per host. Depending on workload characteristics and settings, the instance can deliver up to 34 TiB of usable storage capacity per host. Additionally, VMware indicates that hyperthreading is enabled by default, and security capabilities of VMware Cloud on AWS are improved.
All available services on VMware Cloud on AWS are supported in i3en.metal instances. Its customers can use existing management tools like VMware vRealize Automation, vRealize Operations, and vRealize Network Insight. They could also host virtual desktop infrastructure using VMware Horizon on VMware Cloud on AWS clusters running on i3en.metal instances.
Along with the i3en.metal instance, it was also announced the 2-host cluster capability for VMware Cloud on AWS, which is now available with this instance type. Spinning up a 2-host cluster, VMware customers can get started with persistent full production VMware Cloud on AWS environments at 33% lower cost of entry than a 3-host offering. VMware also mentions that the 2-host cluster supports a range of enterprise workloads such as ROBO, Disaster Recovery Pilot Light, and VDI. Regarding storage policies, VMware adds that the 2-host cluster features RAID-1 and FTT 1 functionality by default.
VMware Cloud on AWS i3en.metal Availability
The i3en.metal instance is currently available in the following regions, and it will be available in additional regions over the coming months.
- AWS US-East-N. Virginia
- AWS US-West-Oregon
- AWS AP-Sydney
- AWS Europe Central-Frankfurt
- AWS Europe-West-London
The 2-host cluster capability is also generally available, and VMware’s full SLA commitment now covers all 2-host clusters. The 2-host cluster is offered in all commercial global AWS Regions where VMware Cloud on AWS is available today for the Amazon EC2 i3.metal instance type, except in the AWS GovCloud (US-West).
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