VMware Cloud on AWS introduces New Regions Across Europe And The U.S., Expanding Cloud Capabilities

VMware announced that it will be expanding VMware Cloud on AWS in Europe and the United States.

Additional new regions for VMware on AWS are expected in AWS EU (Ireland), AWS West (N. California) and AWS East (Ohio) in Q4 2018.  VMware also announced new capabilities for this hybrid cloud service that will enable customers to better protect and secure applications and virtual desktops.

The key advantage of VMware on AWS is that it leverages and protects existing investments in IT and provides consistent infrastructure and operational experience for hybrid cloud deployments on top of VMware enabling seamless cloud migration, scalability and next-generation application strategies. The hybrid cloud services are based on VMware Cloud Foundation and AWS provides resilient and global cloud infrastructure.

Read more at VMware Cloud on AWS and What it Means

Protecting Business Operations with Fast, Large-Scale Disaster Recovery as a Service

VMware announced that VMware Site Recovery will double in scale to 1,000 VMs per SDDC. Thus, reducing the overall cost and operational overhead for protecting large-scale environments.

According to the announcement, "To minimize operational costs, Customers pay only for what they use, when they need it, with granular, on-demand cloud pricing. Elastic DRS enables customers to optimize resource management by automating SDDC cluster scaling after failover happens based on user requirements, and Elastic vSAN with Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) will help customers further reduce costs of protecting storage-intensive workloads."

VMware has teamed with Dell EMC to combine Dell EMC VxRail with VMware Site Recovery. This allows VMware to enable comprehensive push-button failover to VMware Cloud on AWS. This helps customers to quickly set up, test, and failover from VxRail to the cloud on-demand. The mechanism brings in the operational consistency of VMware vSAN hyper-converged infrastructure that powers both VxRail and VMware Cloud on AWS.

The Hybrid Cloud Destination for Virtual Desktops and Applications

VMware Cloud on AWS now supports Horizon 7 Instant Clones for just-in-time provisioning of virtual desktops. Other capabilities announced include 1-2 seconds to spin per virtual desktop, 80 percent reduction in storage for Instant Clones, Rolling desktop patching once users log off.

Horizon 7 is now integrated with the Horizon Cloud Service providing unified visibility, health monitoring, and helpdesk services for Horizon 7 deployments across both VMware Cloud on AWS and on-premises infrastructure.

Supporting Large-Scale, More Secure Cloud Migrations, and Application Portability Globally

A new capability providing predictable, live migration of thousands of virtual machines with zero downtime is available as VMware Cloud Motion with vSphere Replication. It is a part of VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension. Customers can also uniquely live migrate individual applications between and across SDDCs and Availability Zones using VMware vMotion.

Integration between VMware NSX and AWS Direct Connect allows high-performance and intrinsically more secure Virtual Cloud Network to accelerate workload migration to the cloud enabling multi-tier hybrid applications.

New In-Product Support Experience for VMware Cloud on AWS 

At VMworld Europe 2018, introduced VMware’s new In-Product Support Experience for VMware Cloud customers within Cloud Services Console, VMware Cloud on AWS and VMware Skyline.

Customer Opinion

Vice president of IT & research and development, Playtika, Erez Rachmil, said, "As a business that is growing both organically and through M&A, Playtika needs fast access to cloud resources that are consistent with our existing environment. With VMware Cloud on AWS, Playtika created a new development environment for hundreds of developers in only a few days. We also successfully migrated 600 game development VMs to VMware Cloud on AWS using HCX to expand our footprint without disrupting the business or changing policies and internal procedures.”

Hybrid Cloud Architect, Otto Group, Werner Peters, said, “Our businesses cover the full spectrum of retail and retail-related services and, as such, they have unique demands that require our team to react with speed and agility. VMware Cloud on AWS has enabled us to adopt a hybrid cloud environment, providing the flexibility an organization consisting of more than 100 companies requires. VMware Cloud on AWS has received rave reviews from members of our IT team as it allows them to react quickly to the demands of their specific team while improving our own applications easily with additional AWS services. In addition, we are reducing costs associated with spare capacity in our on-premises data centers.”

Executive Opinion

Senior vice president and general manager, Cloud Platform Business Unit, VMware, Mark Lohmeyer, said, “The worldwide footprint of VMware Cloud on AWS continues to grow. For the first time, we’re launching in multiple regions simultaneously while continuing to drive innovation into our global data centers. VMware Cloud on AWS is becoming the preferred environment for customers migrating VMware-based workloads to the cloud. And with more than 200 partners achieving solution competency in just six months, the industry support is stronger than ever. With today’s launch, we’re giving our customers an even stronger hybrid cloud solution to support their most demanding application needs, with the enhanced security and scale they require.”

Vice president, EC2 Windows Enterprise Workloads, Amazon Web Services, Inc., Sandy Carter, said, “Our VMware Cloud on AWS customers are able to uniquely migrate applications such as SAP, Oracle, and SQL Server between and across SDDCs and availability zones faster and more securely than ever before with the use of VMware HCX, VMware vMotion, and VMware NSX integration with AWS Direct Connect. AWS is thrilled to be part of this high-performance and secure cloud solution that takes advantage of a Virtual Cloud Network to accelerate cloud and workload migration, as well as application hybridity, with no additional HW cost.”


With Expanded cloud capabilities delivered for disaster recovery, cloud migration, cloud-based virtual desktops, and in-product support along with new data centers across Europe and the U.S., VMware, and AWS have accelerated their Global Roll Out of VMware Cloud on AWS