Caution: Articles written for technical not grammatical accuracy, If poor grammar offends you proceed with caution ;-)

I’m sure you have all heard the news about the VMware and Amazon partnership. I’ve been getting loads of questions from people and it seems that their are misconceptions on what exactly this means short term. Here is some of what I have heard and some clarification as to what it really is.

The offering will be VMware’s hypervisor running nested on top of AWS. – False

The offering is actually the vSphere hypervisor running on bear metal running inside Amazon’s data center.

I want AWS features, not just vSphere in another datacenter. I don’t see any AWS value or features with this offering – False

The machines running on vSphere in the AWS datacenter can take advantage of lots of AWS offerings such as storage, database offerings, security, analytics, and from what I understand 70 other services. While it’s not the ability to use the AWS API to provision workloads this is still huge. This of projects you may have that utilize AWS services interacting with workloads running in your own physical data center and the what you have to do you secure those interactions. Now you have the ability to run the workloads inside the same data center as those services greatly reducing the complexities of securing those communications.

It’s great but what about NSX?

In the offering vSphere, NSX, and vSAN are all available. I can’t speak to how the cost and licensing works with regards to these, but they are all available.

When will this be generally available?

It is expected to be available sometime late H2 2017.

As more and more info becomes available it will become even more apparent how much value this will add to the enterprise datacenter. Most organizations today have a disconnect when it comes to their on-prem and off-prem workloads. Having a standardizes infrastructure, standardized process, and standardized integrations can only lead to less complex and more manageable infrastructure. As more information becomes available that can be shared I will certainly be focusing more on this area and once possible I will certainly be providing some insight and sneak peaks into this great new partnership.