VMware Amps Up VMware Cloud On AWS

VMware Cloud on AWS finally bulks up! Amazon Web Services and VMware have beefed up the capabilities of their service that targets the enterprise hybrid cloud market.

The two companies launched this service in August.

Initial availability of this blockbuster service was limited to the US West region in Oregon, and overall this new offering was one that held more future promise than current usability.

But it has just taken a massive step forward.

At the AWS re:Invent 2017 conference, the two technology giants have announced that they are expanding VMware Cloud on AWS to the US East region in Norther Virginia. A range of new features are also added in, along with this very welcome expansion.

Including a new disaster recovery as a service offering for enterprises with on-premises datacenters.

Several new add-on services have made the cut to speed up application migration to the cloud, and there are improvements all round in terms of scalability, security, and visibility for mission critical and cloud native applications.

These announcements fulfil a promise that VMware made to add new cloud capabilities every quarter.

Perhaps the most interesting new feature added to the bare metal service is VMware Site Recovery, designed to bolster business continuity and disaster recovery. It allows enterprises with on-premises datacenters to replicate their VMs and data to VMware Cloud on AWS.

Essentially, users can now have access to a second datacenter for disaster recovery, and if their main datacenter goes down, they can failover to VMware on AWS by the simple click of a button. Microsoft Azure already offers a similar service for disaster recovery.

VMware says that disaster recovery as a service is one of its most popular uses cases.

Another powerful new addition is the ability to spin up tens of thousands of VMs.

Upon launch, users were limited to several hundred virtual machines. But in the coming months, VMware Cloud on AWS will support 32-bit clusters and up to 10 clusters per software defined datacenter, meaning enterprises have much better scalability options.

An application migration and portability service has also been announced, called VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension, which allows large scale workload migration into the cloud, while keeping the same networks, IP, and routing policies in place.

VMware vMotion is here to further simplify migrations, allowing for live migrations. It’s available via AWS Direct Connect, enabling customers to connect their corporate networks to the Amazon Web Services platform through private links instead of the internet.

Also available is Wavefront by VMware, a VM infrastructure monitoring service, along with a Hybrid Loyalty Program that offers discounted prices by up to 50% compared to on-demand plans.

All these exciting additions are perhaps less notable than the fact that VMware was able to deliver them in just three months since the service went live — though, understandably, not all of them are available for us immediately.

VMware Site Recovery is, while VMware vMotion, Hybrid Cloud Extension, support for AWS Direct Connect, and multi-cluster support will be available in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2018, which ends February 3, 2018.

Overall, this is about as exciting as it can get for VMware Cloud on AWS users.

If any other enterprise announcement is going to steal its thunder at AWS re:Invent conference, it will have to be something really special. This is stuff of dreams!