Amazon Web Services (AWS) and VMware are completing one of the most relevant partnerships around cloud services: VMware will offer their Software Defined Datacenter (SDDC) capabilities within AWS. With this partnership, VMware finally replaces the already sold vCloud Air cloud services.
The vCloud Air Struggle
VMware started the vCloud Air journey in 2014 as the answer to the growing business around cloud services, which was already led by AWS and Azure. The idea was, of course, to allow the millions of companies already using VMware in their datacenter to move workloads to the cloud transparently in a true hybrid environment.
The vCloud Air solution never took off, VMware never found a way to attract their customers to avoid Amazon or Azure to place their workloads in the cloud. With a struggling business, VMware started to look for options to partner with other companies and sell the vCloud Air platform.
The initial messages to customers started showing in 2016 VMworld where the AWS partnership was announced. Even though no one confirmed that vCloud Air was going to be discontinued, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger said AWS “… will be VMware’s primary cloud infrastructure partner”. VMware sold the vCloud Air solution to French cloud hosting provider OVH in April of 2017.
New Beginnings with Dell Technologies and AWS
VMware is one of the companies under the umbrella of Dell Technologies, this message is representing a big boost for customers that own solutions around servers, networking, storage, software, security, etc.; now they can associate one name for end-to-end solutions. Partnering with AWS, allows customers already owning a hybrid solution in their datacenter and AWS workloads to think about a true and transparent solution.
VMware Cloud on AWS is powered by VMware Cloud Foundation, the unified SDDC platform that integrates vSphere, VMware vSAN, and VMware NSX virtualization technologies with VMware vCenter management. With this, customers already owning any of these platforms will see this integration as very simple and painless.
The service is initially available in the AWS US West (Oregon) region and will expand to AWS regions worldwide in 2018. Pricing will be rated hourly, based on the time the host is active. More information about pricing can be found here: https://cloud.vmware.com/vmc-aws/pricing
VMware is mentioning that the AWS integration will deliver:
- Enterprise capabilities of VMware SDDC with the agility, unmatched functionality, and operational expertise of AWS’s leading public cloud
- Identical skills, tools, and processes for managing private and public cloud environments so customers have consistent operations, improved productivity, and reduced costs
- Seamless, fast, and bi-directional workload portability between private and public clouds
- Flexibility to choose where to run applications based on business needs, while having access to a broad set of AWS services and infrastructure elasticity for VMware SDDC environments
- Rapid time to value with the ability to scale host capacity up or down in a few minutes, and spin up an entire VMware SDDC in under a couple hours
- Ability to run, manage, and secure applications in a hybrid IT environment without having to purchase custom hardware, rewrite applications or modify operating models
