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VMware Updates VMware Cloud On AWS

by Adam Armstrong

VMware Inc. has updated its popular VMware Cloud on AWS with a major quarterly update that the company claims will deliver more of everything. This includes expanding even farther into AWS Europe, to the Frankfurt Region, a new Kickstart ability for SDDC, GDPR readiness, increased availability, and VMware Horizon 7 now available on VMware Cloud on AWS.


VMware Inc. has updated its popular VMware Cloud on AWS with a major quarterly update that the company claims will deliver more of everything. This includes expanding even farther into AWS Europe, to the Frankfurt Region, a new Kickstart ability for SDDC, GDPR readiness, increased availability, and VMware Horizon 7 now available on VMware Cloud on AWS.

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.

VMware Cloud on AWS has been expanding into Europe and has now entered the Frankfurt region. More Europeans will be able to take advantage of the service for the SDDC infrastructure. This brings the total availability to four AWS redions in the last nine months. Speaking of Europe, GDPR went into effect last month and VMware Cloud on AWS was independently verified by Schellman and validated to comply with GDPR requirements.

While VMware Cloud on AWS has been popular the minimal cluster size required four hosts. VMware is looking to kickstart customers usage with a new single host, time bound offering. This allows users to prove the offering before scaling up to a four host or more environment. VMware provides the single host SDDC for 30-day intervals at a low cost and allows for scaling up with no disruption. Highlights include:

  • Kickstart the VMware Cloud on AWS hybrid cloud experience with a 30-day time-bound, single-host configuration, at less than 1/4th the price of 4 host VMware Cloud on AWS offering.
  • Seamlessly scale-up at any time: At the completion of your time-bound offering, your single host SDDC will reset – service life is limited to 30-day intervals. However, you can easily scale-up to the minimum 4-host purchase and continue your cloud expansion without losing any of your data before the time period ends.
  • Start to prove the value of VMware Cloud on AWS with single host capabilities:
    • Accelerated on-boarding with expert support. Single Host SDDC receives the same unlimited 24/7 VMware Global Support Services as well as 24/5 live chat support
    • Migration capabilities between on-premises and VMware Cloud on AWS: VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension for large-scale rapid migration, VMware vMotion for live migration and lastly cold migration.
    • Hybrid Linked Mode support: Single logical view of on-premises and VMware Cloud on AWS resources
    • All-Flash vSAN storage: All Flash vSAN configuration, using flash for both caching and capacity, delivers maximum storage performance.
    • Disaster Recovery: Evaluate VMware Site Recovery, the cloud-based DR service optimized for VMware Cloud on AWS. VMware Site Recovery is purchased separately as an add-on service on a per-VM basis.
    • Seamless high-bandwidth, low latency access to native AWS services

The company has taken VMware Horizon 7 and made it available so that customers can leverage its desktops and apps on VMware Cloud on AWS. Now users will have virtual desktops and applications for their cloud usage. Along with this, VMware announced the availability of its new Stretched Clusters for VMware Cloud on AWS. This adds to the overall availability of the infrastructure. This new capability facilitates zero RPO infrastructure availability for mission-critical applications and enables zero-RPO failover of workloads within clusters spanning two AWS Availability Zones. Customers can use vMotion or live migrate workloads between hosts in a stretched cluster across two AWS availability zones.

The company has enhanced VMware Site Recovery for customers as well. These new enhancements include:

  • Multi-site Disaster Recovery (DR) topology support: Fan-out from on-premises: This capability increases disaster recovery flexibility by extending primary data center protection to VMware Cloud on AWS alongside traditional on-premises DR sites with a unified management tool. Customers can now protect workloads to VMware Cloud on AWS as well as to traditional, on-premises secondary sites from a single, on-premises vCenter Server instance. Multiple instances of VMware Site Recovery Manager can now run with a single instance of vCenter Server on-premises and enable multi-target DR (including to VMware Cloud on AWS) on a per workload level.
  • Replication Seeding: This capability accelerates time to protection by leveraging previously replicated base disks of virtual machines as the seed for the new replication. Replication for VMs that have been protected in the past are now able to use previously replicated base disks as a seed, instead of requiring an initial full sync.
  • Backward compatibility with prior vCenter Server versions: Simplifies DR protection by pairing VMware Site Recovery with sites running earlier versions of vCenter Server. Building on previous releases, VMware Site Recovery is compatible with multiple versions of vCenter Server, allowing you to protect sites running vCenter Server versions 6.7, 6.5 and 6.0U3.

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