VMware announces new capabilities of VMware Cloud on AWS

VMware has announced that VMware Cloud on AWS is available in Amazon Web Services (AWS) Asia-Pacific (Sydney) region. VMware has also announced new capabilities that help organizations around the globe to rapidly migrate applications and data centers to an intrinsically secure cloud service that meets enterprise application needs.

“VMware Cloud on AWS is now available across multiple regions globally including the U.S., Europe, and now Asia-Pacific, and we’ve increased the rate at which we deliver innovative capabilities and powerful solutions for our customers,” said Mark Lohmeyer, Senior Vice- President & General Manager, Cloud Platform Business Unit, VMware. “VMware Cloud on AWS provides a fast and cost-effective way to migrate mission-critical applications, or even entire data centers, to the cloud. And once in the cloud, we provide the industry-leading Software-Defined Data Center capabilities of VMware, coupled with the elasticity, breadth, and depth of AWS infrastructure and services, making it the ideal platform for modern applications.”

Sandy Carter, Vice-President, EC2 Windows Enterprise Workloads, Amazon Web Services, says, “Customers have been asking us to bring VMware Cloud on AWS to Asia-Pacific, and we are pleased to be doing that today. VMware Cloud on AWS is the only hybrid cloud service that allows vSphere customers to leverage consistent infrastructure across on-premises data centers and AWS, allowing them to migrate current and new workloads to the cloud with the most functionality, greatest agility, and best security and performance. VMware Cloud on AWS enables customers to save costs, while also enabling them to scale depending on their application needs.”

The latest VMwareCloud on AWS updates include:

· 50 per cent lower entry-level price and new minimum configuration: VMware will reduce the entry price for VMware Cloud on AWS by 50 per cent 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.

· Licence 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 cut over 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 as part of the core service 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, 768GB 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 auto-scaling: 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.

Services in the AWS Asia-Pacific (Sydney) region, Elastic DRS, Log Intelligence Service, and Cost Insight migration assessment are all available. The 3-host configuration, Custom CPU core count, VM-Host Affinity, new NSX Hybrid Connect capabilities, EBS support, Amazon EC2 R5.metal instance type, NSX and AWS Direct Connect integration, and NSX micro-segmentation are in preview.