One of the major announcements from this year’s VMworld was the culmination of VMware’s partnership with Amazon to launch VMware on AWS. Essentially, you can now run a minimum four host cluster on Amazon’s cloud infrastructure, which puts together vSphere, VSAN, NSX and vCenter into a SaaS offering. The idea is this will mirror on-site infrastructure in either a pure cloud or hybrid cloud formulation.
In his rumination on the announcement, Craig Kilborn looks at some of the immediate uses for this service. He sees this as a rather narrow option, at least in terms of moving directly from on-site to the cloud. The most interesting to me might be for organizations looking to quickly deploy a remote office. This would have to be a sizable office to justify the cost of four hosts, but I could see this being a pretty convincing scenario for rollout.
The pricing on this is the key. Amazon is offering plenty of grunt on these hosts with 36 cores and 512GB of RAM, so performance isn’t an immediate concern. At launch, this is only being offered at hourly rates, which makes it a really expensive proposition. However, 1-year and 3-year reserved instances will soon be available. The latter would theoretically put the cost on par with pure play cloud SaaS offerings.
It does beg the question though if a three year commitment defeats the inherent agility the cloud generally provides. But this is a space that VMware has to be in, even if it doesn’t end up being something that takes over their existing customers.
Craig Kilborn comments:
As VMworld 2017 has just finished I have been giving VMware on AWS some thought. Lot’s of questions have been running through my head, so I thought I would try and transcribe some here.
As VMworld 2017 has just finished I have been giving VMware on AWS some thought. Lot’s of questions have been running through my head, so I thought I would try and transcribe some here.Read more at: VMware on AWS My Thoughts
