Recently, I attended Cloud Field Day 7 and to my delight, VMware presented some really great technical sessions on VMware Cloud on AWS, which is one of my favourite subjects and an area I focus on heavily at work.
The session I am talking about in this post covered some of the enhancements that are being brought to VMware Cloud on AWS. In addition to that, some roadmap items were also revealed to us. There was some great discussion on those topics that continued throughout and to catch all that, I would recommend that you watch this video of the session.
While everything in the session was of great interest to me, there were a couple of things that I was really quite chuffed about so let me quickly tell you about them. Some, I will leave for another post soon.
Elastic DRS Rapid Scale-Out
This feature was eagerly-awaited and when set as an Elastic DRS policy, allows an administrator to configure an SDDC to scale-up quickly by adding up to 4 hosts at a time while reacting to a scale-out event.
The reason it’s a big deal is that until now, there was a timeout of 30 minutes after two consecutive scale-out events. It was a good safety feature to allow an SDDC to settle down after scaling out and avoid the addition of extra hosts unnecessarily.
However, it also posed some challenges in scenarios where a scaled-down cluster needs to expand quickly. For example, in a VDI deployment where an organisation might decide to make cost-saving by scaling-down the cluster to a minimal environment out of office hours. For that to be successful, they would also need to complete the scale-up before office hours start and until now, it was a manual or scripted effort, due to the delay in between scale-up events mentioned above. Now, the administrators can safely scale down in the knowledge that scaling out quickly won’t be a problem and Elastic DRS will do that job for them automatically.
Watching the presentation, you might think that this feature mainly benefits VDI but it can also be useful in the disaster recovery use case. In a “Pilot Light” DR environment, essential services are kept running and protected machines are replicated to the storage but not run. In case of a failover, depending on the number and resource requirements, a substantial number of hosts might need to be added quickly. Again, Elastic DRS was really not suitable for such expansion before but now it gains that functionality so that makes the job of the administrator a lot easier. I’d still exercise a little caution until this option is fully-tested in failover scenarios but this does look promising nevertheless.
I think this is definitely a useful addition to the capabilities that VMware Cloud on AWS offers as, in addition to native integration with AWS services, I see both VDI and DR as the best use cases for VMware Cloud on AWS.
VMware Cloud Director Service for MSPs
There is no denying the benefits and flexibility that a VMware Cloud on AWS brings as a hybrid cloud environment but the startup cost has no doubt been the challenge for smaller organisations.
For traditional VMware environments, Managed Service Providers (MSPs) have been providing multi-tenanted products to their customers for years, using either native vSphere or Cloud Director environments, that provide exactly the amount of resources that their customers require.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have something similar using VMware Cloud on AWS as the platform so that it becomes affordable to all customers, whatever their size? Of course, it would be and that’s what this one is all about.
Now, this is not “news” as VMware has been working on this for a while now and MSPs have been aware of it too. However, talking about this roadmap item means availability is not that far off and I am quite excited about this capability too.
I work for an MSP (Rackspace) and I have indeed seen quite a few customers pondering the cost conundrum. I do think this option will remove the cost barrier for them and uptake of this unique service will no doubt grow as a result.
Conclusion
I’ve always been a big fan of the unique solution that VMware Cloud on AWS is but I also think that it is maturing rapidly as time goes by. It is natural for a product to make a start but then evolve and mature in accordance with customer needs and we’re witnessing that with the introduction of these enhancements and the roadmap items that Narayan mentioned in his presentation.
Long may that continue!
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