Sai Gopalan, Product Line Marketing Manager

Emad Younis, Senior Technical Marketing Engineer

We are excited to announce that VMware Cloud on AWS is now available in the AWS U.S. East (N. Virginia) region. In addition to bringing this service to a new region, we are also introducing a new set of capabilities that enable customers to migrate, run and protect production applications at scale. The release delivers on the Disaster Recovery as a Service use-case while significantly improving and expanding the capabilities of the Application Migration to the Cloud and the On-demand capacity use cases.

This announcement comes a short three months after we announced the availability of this service for the first time in the AWS U.S. West (Oregon) region. VMware Cloud on AWS is a seamlessly integrated hybrid cloud offering that delivers an on-demand service, enabling customers to run applications across vSphere-based cloud environments with access to a broad range of AWS services. Powered by VMware Cloud Foundation, this service integrates VMware’s flagship compute, storage and network virtualization products (VMware vSphere, VMware vSAN and VMware NSX) along with VMware vCenter management, and is optimized to run on elastic, bare-metal AWS infrastructure. It provides customers an operationally consistent and familiar way to run, manage and secure applications in a hybrid IT environment with access to a broad range of AWS services and robust disaster protection, bringing the best of VMware and AWS. Customers can continue to use familiar VMware tools to manage their VMware Cloud on AWS environments without having to purchase custom hardware, rewrite applications or modify their operating model.

Let us unpack this release and all the powerful capabilities it brings:

New region availability: Customers can now create VMware SDDCs in AWS US East (N. Virginia) region

Business continuity for Mission-critical applications…and more: Build on the intrinsic infrastructure high-availability that VMware Cloud on AWS provides, with the delivery of Disaster Recovery as a Service:

VMware Site Recovery service, optimized for VMware Cloud on AWS, delivers proven disaster recovery as a service and reduces secondary site costs, accelerates time-to-protection and simplifies disaster recovery operations – available as an add-on service. It delivers flexible protection either between on-premises and VMware Cloud on AWS or between two VMware Cloud on AWS environments running in separate AWS availability zones (multi-AZ availability), without application re-architecture.

VMware Site Recovery is based on industry leading, enterprise-grade recovery plan automation (VMware Site Recovery Manager) and native hypervisor-based VM-level granular replication capabilities (VMware vSphere Replication) trusted by thousands of customers.

Customers can now purchase VMware Site Recovery as an add-on to VMware Cloud on AWS. Learn more here

Learn more about VMware Site Recovery in our blog post.

Enterprise scale and performance:

Increased scale for the most demanding enterprises with support for up to 32 hosts per cluster, up to 10 clusters per SDDC1, and multiple SDDCs per customer within VMware Cloud on AWS. This enables support for customer environments as large as tens of thousands of VMs. These SDDCs can be in deployed in any AZ in the regions supported.

for the most demanding enterprises with support for up to 32 hosts per cluster, up to 10 clusters per SDDC1, and multiple SDDCs per customer within VMware Cloud on AWS. This enables support for customer environments as large as tens of thousands of VMs. These SDDCs can be in deployed in any AZ in the regions supported. Optimized to run on high-performance, dedicated, elastic, bare-metal AWS infrastructure.

Seamless bi-directional application migration and hybrid networking:

Rapid, large-scale application migration with secure multisite interconnects between any vSphere version on-premises and VMware Cloud on AWS via VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension.

Allows for live migrations as well as warm/cold bulk migrations of applications. There is no retrofit required.

Enables hybrid applications with its multisite, WAN-optimized, highly secure, load balanced and traffic engineered network extensions.

Learn more about VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension and VMware Cloud on AWS here.

Live application migration (VMware vMotion) and the ability to stretch layer 2 networks between on-premises and VMware Cloud on AWS.

AWS Direct Connect high-speed, reliable and private network connectivity between on-premises and VMware Cloud on AWS supporting faster cold and live application migration (vMotion). AWS Direct Connect private connectivity to VMware Cloud on AWS currently supports data transfer traffic for cold migration and vMotion only.

Simple and consistent operations for rapid time to value:

Hybrid Linked Mode improvements: Enhance single logical view and hybrid management of resources by extending an administrator’s view from an on-premises environment with multiple linked VMware vCenter Server instances to a VMware Cloud on AWS environment.

In-service guided walkthrough for onboarding and common configuration tasks to accelerate time to value.

Content Library – Customers can leverage the same VM templates they use in their on-premises environment in VMware Cloud on AWS with support for .VMTX format.

AWS Services Integrations:

You can extend the value of your applications running in VMware Cloud on AWS seamlessly with AWS native services. If you remember, VMware Cloud on AWS is running directly on AWS elastic bare-metal infrastructure, which provides high bandwidth, low latency connectivity to AWS services. Virtual machine workloads can access public API endpoints for AWS services such as AWS Lambda, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), Amazon S3 and Elastic Load Balancing, as well as private resources in the customer’s Amazon VPC such as Amazon EC2, and data and analytics services such as Amazon RDS, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Kinesis and Amazon Redshift. You can also now enjoy Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) for a fully managed file service to scale the file-based storage automatically to petabyte scale with high availability and durability across multiple availability zones and the newest generation of VPC Endpoints designed to access AWS services while keeping all the traffic within the AWS network.

Support for Wavefront by VMware:

For application teams, VMware is adding support for Wavefront by VMware, a VMware Cloud Service that allows customers to visualize, alert upon, and troubleshoot applications running on VMware Cloud on AWS. Wavefront by VMware provides an open API platform supporting more than 80 integrations and pre-packaged dashboards from all elements of your stack, spanning open-source, commercial, and custom data sources. Learn more about Wavefront here.

Flexible consumption models and investment protection:

Earlier in November, we made 1-year and 3-year subscription options available for the core service – this enables our customers to enjoy larger discounts over greater time commitments.

Broadening ISV Technology Solutions Support:

VMware Cloud on AWS technology partner ecosystem is growing:

For data protection, we have Veeam and Druva available for customers.

A collaboration with NetApp, allows customers the ability to now use ONTAP Cloud to provide block and file storage to VMware Cloud on AWS guest operating systems.

For load balancing, application analytics, predictive scaling and security, we have Avi Networks

Introducing new partners such as: Runecast for compliance, RightScale for cloud management, CloudHealth for application migration – with more on the way.

Read about what’s new with our partner ecosystem in this blog post here.

And once again this is just the beginning. Our customers can expect the same feature velocity and frequency of releases to continue delivering new exciting capabilities to VMware Cloud on AWS and expanding the service to more AWS regions. Stay tuned for more updates.

You can learn more about our service at: https://cloud.vmware.com/vmc-aws

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Preview: Feature(s) released in preview to gather feedback. May not be available to all applicable customers or in all AWS regions. We cannot guarantee that features that are in “Preview’ will become available within any particular time frame or at all. Make your purchase decisions only on the basis of features that are available. For latest status, visit our website