VMware Cloud on AWS Initial Availability

At VMworld 2017 today VMware is announcing updates around VMware Cloud on AWS. This has been an announcement almost a year in the making. VMware has been seeing many of its traditional enterprise customers move to AWS and finally caved. It sold its vCloud Air business this year. Now it is finally able to offer VMware Cloud on AWS and you can get started here.

From the VMware Cloud on AWS Announcement

Here is an excerpt from today’s press release.

VMware Cloud on AWS is powered by VMware Cloud Foundation, the unified SDDC platform that integrates vSphere, VMware VSAN, and VMware NSX virtualization technologies with VMware vCenter management. This means customers can use familiar VMware tools to manage their applications, without having to purchase any new or custom hardware, rewrite applications, or modify their operating model. With VMware Cloud on AWS, customers can leverage AWS’s breadth of services, including compute, databases, analytics, Internet of Things (IoT), security, mobile, deployment, application services, and more.

VMware Cloud on AWS delivers:

• Enterprise capabilities of VMware SDDC with the agility, unmatched functionality, and operational expertise of AWS’s leading public cloud
• Identical skills, tools, and processes for managing private and public cloud environments so customers have consistent operations, improved productivity, and reduced costs
• Seamless, fast, and bi-directional workload portability between private and public clouds
• Flexibility to choose where to run applications based on business needs, while having access to a broad set of AWS services and infrastructure elasticity for VMware SDDC environments
• Rapid time to value with the ability to scale host capacity up or down in a few minutes, and spin up an entire VMware SDDC in under a couple hours
• Ability to run, manage, and secure applications in a hybrid IT environment without having to purchase custom hardware, rewrite applications, or modify operating models

VMware Cloud on AWS is ideal for customers looking to migrate applications to the public cloud, develop entirely new applications, extend the capacity of their data centers for existing applications, or quickly provision development and test environments. It will also support containerized workloads and DevOps services such as Pivotal Cloud Foundry, and others. VMware and AWS plan to continue to innovate together to add new capabilities and additional AWS regions to support customers that want to use VMware Cloud on AWS for disaster recovery, data center consolidation, and geographic expansion.

The service is initially available in the AWS US West (Oregon) region and will expand to AWS regions worldwide in 2018. Today customers can consume this service hourly and pay only for each hour that a host is active in their account. Pricing and requirements can be found at http://cloud.vmware.com/vmc-aws/pricing. VMware will make one-year and three-year subscription options available in the future. VMware’s Hybrid Loyalty Program will provide discounts to customers with on-premises VMware vSphere, NSX, and/or vSAN licenses. The pricing model, combined with the VMware Hybrid Loyalty Program discounts, will offer very attractive TCO benefits on a per-VM basis to both VMware and AWS customers.