LAS VEGAS — VMware kicked off its annual VMworld event Sunday night by rolling out VMware Cloud on AWS in Sydney. With this expansion to Amazon Web Services’ Asia-Pacific region, the hybrid cloud platform is now available across all major geographies. VMware is also reducing the entry price for VMware Cloud on AWS by 50 percent for a limited time and offering a smaller, three-host minimum software-defined data center configuration as a starting point for production workloads. It used to have a four-host minimum.
Of its global expansion, Mark Lohmeyer, senior vice president and general manager of the Cloud Platform business unit in VMware, said, “In less than a year we have [a] footprint across all those geographies.”
VMware and AWS launched the product in the U.S. at last year’s VMworld. It expanded to AWS’ London region in March, and added AWS Europe (Frankfurt) in June.
With each new release the companies have also added new capabilities, and this one is no different. The latest VMware Cloud on AWS updates include:
- Customers can live migrate thousands of virtual machines (VMs) with zero downtime using VMware NSX Hybrid Connect (previously called VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension).
- High-capacity storage option via integration with Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS). “We see this as a key capability to VMware Cloud on AWS because now you can scale storage independently of your compute,” said Chris Wolf, VMware’s chief technology officer for Global Field and Industry. These new clusters provide scalable storage capabilities with VMware vSAN utilizing Amazon EBS and run on new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) R5.metal instances.
- Application-centric security using NSX microsegmentation capabilities. This provides granular control over east-west traffic between workloads running in VMware Cloud on AWS. “This means your security administrators can apply security policies that go anywhere the application runs, whether on premises, on VMware Cloud on AWS, or other clouds,” Wolf said.
- Integration between NSX and AWS Direct Connect enables private connectivity between VMware workloads running on VMware Cloud on AWS and those running on premises.
- Custom CPU core count capabilities so customers can specify the number of CPU cores needed, thus reducing the cost of running enterprise applications that are licensed per CPU core.
- Elastic DRS to enable automated scaling up or down of hosts and rebalancing of clusters based on the needs of the applications and the policies the customer defines.
