VMware has announced new capabilities designed to further improve the economic value of VMware Cloud on AWS while meeting an evolving set of requirements for application modernization, business continuity and resiliency, and cloud migration. These new offerings include the new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) i3en instances that can deliver nearly 50% lower cost per GB of raw storage, a 2-host SDDC configuration that lowers the entry price for production environments by 33%, and a new multi-tenant cloud management service that enables partners to support 5-10x more customers with no additional upfront costs, while enabling smaller organizations to purchase VMware Cloud on AWS on a per VM rather than per host basis.
VMware Cloud on AWS is a jointly engineered service that brings VMware Cloud Foundation to Amazon Web Services (AWS), with optimized access to AWS services. The service offers ultra-fast cloud migration, powered by VMware HCX and vMotion combined with consistent hybrid cloud infrastructure and operations. Once applications are migrated, customers can run, manage, and modernize these applications with the VMware Tanzu portfolio as well as integrate native AWS services.
“VMware Cloud on AWS unlocks the power of cloud, enabling customers to rapidly migrate apps, scale resources up or down based on demand, deliver resources for new remote work initiatives, and drive app modernization strategies,” said Mark Lohmeyer, senior vice president and general manager, cloud services business unit, VMware. “Along with AWS, VMware’s preferred public cloud partner for vSphere-based workloads, we are accelerating service innovation and broadening access to VMware Cloud on AWS to help more businesses support the demands of a broad range of enterprise applications and use cases, while delivering the best economic value.”
VMware has also announced the following enhancements:
New i3en.metal Instance: this new host type is based on 2nd generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors. It’s designed for storage-dense workloads with high-performance requirements and delivers superior economics at scale for data center migration and disaster recovery transformation projects. These new instances deliver 4x the raw storage capacity at roughly half the cost per GB of storage per host of current offerings. In addition, it comes with low latency Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) SSD capacity for applications that require high random I/O access to large amounts of data such as relational databases. Native encryption at the NIC level offers better security for east-west traffic within the SDDC boundaries. Customer can gain even better economics by mixing and matching i3en instances for storage demanding workloads with i3.metal instances for compute/memory demanding workloads.
2-Host Production Cluster Lowers Starting Cost by 33%: The 2-host cluster provides a new, smaller minimum environment for production workloads, enabling even more customers, partners, and managed service providers (MSPs) to get started with VMware Cloud on AWS. The 2-host cluster is ideal for proving the value of VMware Cloud on AWS and reducing cost of getting started. With the 2-host cluster, customers can get started with persistent VMware Cloud on AWS environments at up to 33 percent lower cost of entry than a 3-host cluster.
Embrace cloud native infrastructure with VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid: Organizations can deploy, scale, and manage containerized applications on VMware Cloud on AWS with the addition of Tanzu Kubernetes Grid. Tanzu Kubernetes Grid packages open source technologies and automation tooling to help customers get up and running quickly with a scalable, multi-cluster Kubernetes environment. With Tanzu Kubernetes Grid on VMware Cloud on AWS, customers can deploy their SDDC in the cloud, with all the required components needed to architect and scale Kubernetes to fit their needs.
Expanded Networking Options: VMware Transit Connect (Preview) will eliminate the hassles of self-deploying and managing complex configurations to establish a connectivity fabric across VMware Cloud on AWS SDDCs, Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (Amazon VPCs), and on-premises environments. The solution, which is based on the AWS Transit Gateway service, is a high-bandwidth, low latency and resilient connectivity solution that will be operationally simple with automated provisioning and controls. The connectivity model automatically scales up/down linearly as new environments are added or removed from a group, providing users with flexibility. Additionally, with support for the industry-leading VMware SD-WAN, users at branches or remote locations can have a better network connectivity to workloads deployed on VMware Cloud on AWS. VMware SD-WAN provides a cloud-delivered, transport-agnostic architecture supporting and optimizing any WAN link or combination of links.
Multi-tenancy lowers MSPs costs, opens new opportunities with SMBs: VMware Cloud Director service provides MSPs with a pay-as-you-grow model, thus reducing the overhead costs to pursue small and medium-sized businesses. The service enables partners to provide flexibility in pricing and environment size by dividing their VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC environments into multi-tenanted resource pools, with fine-grained control of resource allocation and support for differing consumption models. MSPs can quickly implement changes to resource pools across hosts and pair regions to support geo-expansion and quickly adapt to changing customer requirements. They can also accelerate time-to-market by reducing operational overhead with familiar management and a consistent experience for their end customers.
