VMware and Amazon grow hybrid cloud tie-up
Partnership to run VMware workloads at “very large scale” on AWS
VMware and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are expanding their hybrid cloud partnership to run VMware workloads at “very large scale” on AWS, a VMware executive says. VMware is launching new tools for migrating and scaling production applications to AWS, as well as business continuity and disaster recovery services, reports Enterprise Cloud News (Banking Technology’s sister publication).
The new VMware Cloud on AWS services build on a partnership the two companies kicked off in August at VMworld conference in Las Vegas. The new services are being announced at the AWS re:Invent 2017 conference in the same town.
“We are enabling our customers to run their production applications, migrate their production applications and protect their production applications on AWS,” Ivan Oprencak, director of product marketing for VMware Cloud on AWS, tells Enterprise Cloud News.
Since VMware Cloud on AWS launched in August, it’s been available on AWS’s West Coast region in Oregon, and now it’s expanding to the AWS US East North Virginia region, making it available on both coasts of the US. The companies hope to have the service available on all major AWS geographical regions by the end of next year, Oprencak says.
The service provides compute using vSphere, storage using VMware vSAN and networking using VMware NSX on AWS bare metal, supported by VMware, with unified vRealize management tools for on-premises and cloud workloads. It’s based on vSphere, with the same services running on both vSphere on premises and on AWS, including container services; infrastructure solutions such as security, firewalls, and load balancers; and business applications such as Oracle and Microsoft.
Simplified Cloud Migration supports VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension, for migrating applications at large scale and running hybrid applications simultaneously on premises and on AWS. The migration service supports vMotion, for moving running applications from one server to another without interruption, and “L2 stretched networking,” extending Layer 2 networks from on premises to AWS with the same configuration, subnet, and IP addressing, Oprencak says.
Cloud migration also supports AWS Direct Connect, providing high-performance dedicated connections between on-premises infrastructure and the cloud using service provider partners.
The two companies are increasing the scale of their joint services, to support tens of thousands of virtual machines, Oprencak says.
AWS and VMware are betting they can turn their separate weaknesses into combined strength. AWS is a public cloud provider without enterprise on-premises presence, and VMware is an on-premises infrastructure vendor that’s been unsuccessful in trying to launch a public cloud. By teaming up, the two companies hope to offer enterprises a hybrid cloud platform spanning both on-premises and the public cloud.
AWS’s and VMware’s competitors are looking to meet similar challenges of bridging public cloud and on-premises infrastructure. Microsoft already has a strong hybrid cloud line-up, with the Microsoft Azure public cloud and an enterprise product line going back a quarter century. Last year, Microsoft launched Azure Stack, which extends its Azure public cloud into an on-premises appliance.
And VMware competitor Cisco is partnering with AWS competitor Google to extend Cisco on-premises infrastructure software into the Google Cloud Platform .
