Beefed Up VMware Cloud on AWS Extends East

AWS RE:INVENT — VMware Cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS) is expanding availability from the western U.S. (Oregon) to the East (Northern Virginia), and includes additional capabilities and support for more AWS services.

The announcement was made at this week’s AWS re:Invent 2017. The expanded capabilities aim to make it easier for customers to move, run and protect mission-critical applications at scale. VMware now is offering one- and three-year subscription options for VMware Cloud on AWS, in addition to the existing hourly, on-demand pricing.

VMware’s Mark Lohmeyer

“The momentum for VMware Cloud on AWS is growing rapidly, and VMware and AWS are delivering major new capabilities after only three months of availability while enhancing our strategic relationship with new integrations across our platforms,” said Mark Lohmeyer, vice president and general manager of VMware’s cloud platform business unit. “Customers of VMware Cloud on AWS will be able to migrate application portfolios to the cloud even more rapidly with Hybrid Cloud Extension and AWS Direct Connect, while maintaining the optimal levels of performance, scale and availability required for mission-critical apps.”

Customers have the ability to choose where to run their workloads based on their business needs. With VMware vSphere vMotion, new L2 stretched networking features and Direct Connect, they will be able to migrate applications from their on-premises VMware cluster into VMware on AWS without any disruptions to the application, and without having to make any changes to the network configuration.

Customers also will be able to use Direct Connect for private network connectivity, supporting faster cold and live application migration with vMotion, VMware said.

VMware Site Recovery, a new service, delivers protection between customer data centers and VMware Cloud on AWS, or between environments running in separate AWS availability zones (AZs).

VMware and AWS are expanding the scale, network connectivity and security capabilities of VMware Cloud on AWS to further support the most resource intensive applications such as Oracle, Oracle RAC, Microsoft SQL Server, Apache Spark and Hadoop.

VMware Cloud on AWS supports 32 host clusters and multiple software-defined data centers (SDDC) per organization today, and will support 10 clusters per SDDC soon, VMware said. This will allow a single customer to support environments as large as tens of thousands of VMs.

“We are pleased to extend availability of VMware Cloud on AWS to the AWS U.S. East region,” said Sandy Carter, AWS’ vice president of enterprise workloads. “Both teams have been really focused on quickly iterating to provide the capabilities that our customers have told us they want. In addition to the availability, networking and security features that will further support production workloads, we’re excited to extend native integrations with AWS Direct Connect.”

Also during AWS re:Invent: