VMWare Cloud on AWS
VMWare is the oldest and one of the most reliable infrastructure Virtualization platforms and a key player in private clouds. AWS still enjoys the largest market share in public cloud and is most experienced cloud platform. With the emerging trend in favour of hybrid cloud, both AWS and VMWare have collaborated and introduced an integrated cloud offering which delivers a highly scalable and secure extension of on-premise vSphere-based environments to AWS cloud. This service is termed as VMWare Cloud on AWS.
VMWare cloud on AWS is a on-demand service which is optimised to run on dedicated elastic AWS bare metal infrastructure and integrates VMWare vCenter Management with VMWare vSphere, VMWare vSAN, VMWare NSX. It enables organisations infrastructure teams to manage their cloud-based resources with familiar VMWare tools. VMware Cloud on AWS is a SDDC (software defined datacenter) that enables customers to maintain consistent SLAs across private, public and hybrid cloud infrastructures. As of “August 2022” AWS is offering a Rapid Trial Program for VMWare cloud on AWS which gives 14 days free usage.
This service can be highly suitable in the following scenarios:
- Using VMware technologies in co-location or in-house data centre and planning for its extension. Take it to AWS cloud with a marginal learning curve for your technical staff.
- Do not want to refactor or re-platform your existing production workloads and still want to leverage the scaling benefits of cloud.
- Expansion to new Geographic Locations
- Disaster recovery solution with VMWare site recovery
- Build next generation applications utilizing AWS services
Architectural Overview:
It is powered by VMWare cloud foundation a unified SDDC (Software-defined datacenter) that integrates VMWare vSphere, VMware virtual SAN and VMWare NSX technologies along with vCenter management and optimises it to run on next-generation, elastic, bare-metal AWS infrastructure. Customers can still operate their virtual machines and containers in a similar fashion as on-premises vSphere environment.
All-Flash vSAN acts as the storage platform and consumes host local NVMe flash devices. NSX is used for all network functionality, and it connects the ESXi hosts to the AWS network and exposes logical networks for virtual machine networking. VMWare cloud on AWS can be used on its own or can connect two vCenters to a single pane of glass for hybrid cloud management for operations and provisioning by enabling vCenter Hybrid Linked Mode.
VMware cloud on AWS takes advantage of being on the same network as underlying AWS services. It enables customers to place application closer to the AWS services acting as data source which helps to build new application architectures with minimal latency, network overhead and reduced AWS network outbound costs.
VMWare Cloud on AWS offers a flexible and easy to use consumption model:
- Single bill for VMware software + AWS infrastructure
- Consume elastically scalable SDDC clusters
- On-demand or reserved instance model
- Leverage global AWS footprint
- User need not to worry about managing VMWare software patches, updates, and upgrades as on cloud VMWare makes sure that service is always up to date.