What is VMware Cloud on AWS ?

VMware Cloud on AWS allows the use of familiar VMware products while leveraging the benefits of a public cloud. A hybrid infrastructure can be created between an on-premises VMware vSphere software-defined data center (SDDC) and a VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC.

VMware Cloud on AWS allows you to create vSphere data centers on Amazon Web Services and these vSphere data centers include vCenter Server for managing your data center, vSAN for storage, and VMware NSX for networking. you can use Hybrid Linked Mode, if you want to connect an on-premises data center to your cloud SDDC, and manage both from a single vSphere Client interface. Hybrid Linked Mode is like existing Enhanced Linked mode additionally it support cross SSO connection and vMotion.

VMware Cloud on AWS offers the following benefits:

• It reduces capital and operational expenditures.
• It reduces time to market for new applications.
• It helps in enhanced scalability of applications in reduced time frames.
• It helps in achieving greater availability of applications.
• Your Application will have reduced recovery time objective (RTO).
• and the most important one , it helps you to reduce staff time performing maintenance operations.

VMware Cloud Foundation

VMware Cloud Foundation is the unified SDDC platform that bundles vSphere, vSAN, and VMware NSX into a natively integrated stack to deliver enterprise-ready cloud infrastructure for the private and public cloud.

Secret sauce behind cloud foundation is VMware SDDC Manager which manages the initial configuration of the Cloud Foundation system, creates and manages workload domains, and performs life cycle management to ensure that the software components remain up to date. SDDC Manager also monitors the logical and physical resources of Cloud Foundation.

VMware Cloud on AWS is powered by VMware Cloud Foundation.

So in nutshell VMware Cloud on AWS uses VMware Cloud Foundation and VMware Validated Design to provide VMware SDDC and other migration solution on the hardware of AWS.

All components of this solution are delivered, operated, and supported by VMware Global Support Services. VMware fully certifies and supports all hardware and software components of this service. The customers are facing issue around managing firmware , patches , upgrades of underline infrastructure, now with VMware Cloud on AWS , VMware removed the burden of managing software patches, updates, or upgrades.  all this will be managed and maintained by VMware itself.

Use Cases

Data Center Extension:

• DC extension of the on-premises data center to the public cloud to expand resource capacity, increase disaster avoidance and recovery options, or localize application instances to new geographic regions. For Example, one Organisation which is successful in one particular region and wants to grow their foot print across another region, in-stead of arranging data center space , hardware etc , this organisation can focus on core business and order IT infrastructure on VMware on AWS and just clone / migrate application vms to this localized data center.

Data Center Consolidation:

• Maintaining a Datacenter is not easy, you have to take care of multi-source power , cooling , power backups , people , access management,BMS operations, Real state etc.., so instead of you managing Data Center , let VMware maintain your data center by consolidation of the on-premises data center costs by migrating applications from on-premises data center to the public cloud to reduce data center costs, prevent costs from growing, or close data centers entirely.

Data Center Peering:

• Peering private and public cloud to allow for moving workloads between clouds. For example, moving applications from development or test to production or vice versa. or running CI/CD across private and public cloud.

This gives you basic understanding about what is VMware on AWS , in next few posts i will be covering how to install and configure this service.