Last year’s VMworld teased the upcoming release of VMware Cloud on AWS and the partnership between VMware and Amazon but until this week, it was largely kept under wraps. This week, at VMworld 2017, VMware announced the initial GA of VMware Cloud on AWS so the wait is finally over for some of us.
When this was initially announced last year, I immediately became excited as one of the hardest things to explain to colleagues and potential cloud consumers is all the intracacies of AWS’ platform. Every month they are pushing new features and enhancements and unless you are an IT shop that lives day in and day out up there, it becomes very daunting to keep up with. The beauty of VMware Cloud on AWS is in it’s familiarity to your staff. It allows you to put your workloads on AWS without having to re-train your entire staff on the inner workings of AWS itself… they simply continue using their years of vSphere knowledge in a friendly web portal and leave the hardware worries to VMware and Amazon.
There are a few limitations in it’s current state but as with most things in the cloud, will be enhanced at a rapid rate. Below I will share what I think are the most important takeaways for potential users of VMware Cloud on AWS:
Pricing
Nothing too surprising here in terms of seeing substantial discounts going reserved versus on-demand. This is a standard practice in the AWS and all cloud providers pricing schemes so it is nice to see they followed suit here as well.
Note, the above prices are for a minimum deployment of 4 hosts and scale up from there based upon host count.
Hosting
At the time of writing, AWS-West is the only region available for VMware Cloud on AWS.
Since we are currently stuck to a single region, the minimum VMware Cloud on AWS deployment is 4 hosts. This allows for the SDDC cluster to have HA and DRS enabled as well as the VSAN cluster supporting FTT=1. Currently, you cannot modify the HA/DRS rules for VMware Cloud on AWS.
As said above, the minimum cluster size is 4 hosts to a maximum of 16. This means at minimum you will have 8 CPUs, 144 vCPUs, 2TB RAM, and 42.8TB of NVMe VSAN storage. Fully maxed out, you will have 32 CPUs, 576 vCPUs, 8TB RAM, and 171.2 TB NVMe VSAN storage.
Hybrid vCenter Linked Mode is also supported. You will need to open the proper ports on your firewall as well as configuring a VPN tunnel between your AWS VPC and on-premises datacenter.
You can find a few videos on showing ease of deployment of your SDDC cluster on AWS as well as more information here, on the VMware Cloud on AWS official website.
