Right from the start, VMware Cloud on AWS has been a service that is built to remain at the cutting edge of what VMware has to offer. Due to those updates, one would think there wouldn’t be much to announce at VMware Explore.
However, one would be wrong here as there are a few updates that I am sure will be extremely attractive for customers considering their move towards VMware Cloud on AWS.
There are three key updates:
- VMware Cloud Flex Storage
- NFS Datastore Support for Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP
- VMware Cloud Flex Compute (in preview)
Let’s discuss those in turn…
VMware Cloud Flex Storage
I first wrote about this service going into preview back in March and the news is that now, it’s generally available for consumption.
As I wrote in that post mentioned above, the barrier to entry for interested customers has always been the cost and that’s especially true for storage-heavy workloads. Having this service generally available will reduce that cost significantly for most workloads and should have a positive effect on the subscription levels.
A reminder that this storage is not as performant as the native vSAN storage but then, such performance is not always required. Also, the native storage is still available as before for workloads that require performance so nothing to worry about there.
The service hasn’t changed from the time I wrote about it so this will do for now. Do check it out if you’re looking to move storage-heavy workloads to VMware Cloud on AWS – resulting in a higher number of hosts. You might just be able to reduce that number now and therefore, the cost.
NFS Datastore Support for Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP
Like all VMware Cloud on AWS solutions, this one is also a jointly engineered solution which is AWS managed but an external NFS datastore running on NetApp’s ONTAP file storage system and is generally available now.
Virtualisation and storage admins are well-familiar with NetApp storage systems for years. For that reason, its interface and capabilities are familiar to storage admins and so, this feature goes a long way in alleviating any storage management concerns.
So, this is yet another option that helps scale VM datastore storage independently to the number of hosts in the clusters and keeps the cost increment in check. It is a multi-tenant and multi-protocol storage environment, so it provides all the popular protocols e.g. NFS 3/4.1, iSCSI or SMB.
Another key capability is its ability to provide a synchronous mirror across availability zones and that’s one popular ask from most customers I talk to frequently. For mission-critical workloads, that’s one solution that provides peace of mind. Amazon FSx for ONTAP is distributed across availability zones so it’s resilient against a single-AZ failure. Of course, that also means that the service will only be available where multi-AZ Amazon FSx services are available.
Note that in this case, we’re not going through the “connected VPC”. This environment is connected via a Transit Gateway but then also allows multiple VPC to be connected, one of them hosting the Amazon FSx for ONTAP service too.
There’s also clear demarcation in terms of support:
It’s primarily supported by the customer but if things go wrong, VMware is the first point of call. As you would expect, they are responsible for SDDC, NFS clients and the virtualisation side in general. If it’s all clear on that side then VMware will request the customer to open a case with AWS, who will look at the underlying services such as Amazon FSx for NetApp Service and ONTAP configuration issues etc.
VMware Cloud Flex Compute (in preview)
Talking about the cost being the barrier to entry for VMware Cloud on AWS environments: Despite the reduction in minimum cluster sizes over the years – a minimum of 2 now – customers have always had to buy i3 or i3en instances as a whole.
With VMware Cloud Flex Compute now, VMware will be partitioning its hosts into smaller flex compute units, which are essentially resource pools of compute, storage, networking etc. Customers will be able to buy as many flexible compute units as they need and increase or decrease them as their computing needs change – which happens within minutes.
This is significant for smaller customers who have found the starting costs of VMware Cloud on AWS to be too high for their budgets. I am confident that it will (once generally available) provide the solution to customers who couldn’t possibly consider moving their VMware workloads to the cloud, due to its starting cost.
VMware is starting the early access program for it so if you are interested, do send a mail to the address listed in the slide above.
Conclusion
It is no surprise that all these updates are geared towards lowering the barrier to entry for new customers and allowing the ability to scale VMware Cloud on AWS datastore storage independently of compute – which is a major source of cost inflation once workloads start running on the platform.
These updates are exactly what most customers (and partners for that matter!) were looking for and I am sure this will result in an uptick in organisations moving their workloads to VMware Cloud on AWS.
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