VMware, Inc. today announced new capabilities designed to further improve the economic value of VMware Cloud on AWS while meeting an evolving set of requirements for application modernization, business continuity and resiliency, and cloud migration. These new offerings include the new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) i3en instances that can deliver nearly 50% lower cost per GB of raw storage, a 2-host SDDC configuration that lowers the entry price for production environments by 33%, and a new multi-tenant cloud management service that enables partners to support 5-10x more customers with no additional upfront costs, while enabling smaller organizations to purchase VMware Cloud on AWS on a per VM rather than per host basis.

VMware Cloud on AWS is a jointly engineered service that brings VMware Cloud Foundation to Amazon Web Services (AWS), with optimized access to AWS services. The service offers ultra-fast cloud migration, powered by VMware HCX and vMotion combined with consistent hybrid cloud infrastructure and operations. Once applications are migrated, customers can run, manage, and modernize these applications with the VMware Tanzu portfolio as well as integrate native AWS services. As of June 2020, total VMs are up 3.5x and total number of hosts up 2.5x year over year. More than 500 channel partners have achieved a VMware Cloud on AWS service competency, including 43 with a Master Services Competency, and there are more than 300 certified or validated technology solutions available to VMware Cloud on AWS customers.

"VMware Cloud on AWS unlocks the power of cloud, enabling customers to rapidly migrate apps, scale resources up or down based on demand, deliver resources for new remote work initiatives, and drive app modernization strategies," said Mark Lohmeyer, senior vice president and general manager, cloud services business unit, VMware. "Along with AWS, VMware's preferred public cloud partner for vSphere-based workloads, we are accelerating service innovation and broadening access to VMware Cloud on AWS to help more businesses support the demands of a broad range of enterprise applications and use cases, while delivering the best economic value."

"Customers want cloud services that are available anywhere they operate in the world, can deliver real business value and financial savings, support their needs instantly as priorities change," said David Brown, vice president, EC2, Amazon Web Services, Inc. "We are delighted to be working with VMware to allow customers to build and operate applications in AWS Regions, using the same foundation they use in their data centers today, which is why VMware Cloud on AWS is our preferred service for all vSphere-based workloads."

VMware Cloud on AWS Delivers New Innovations, Better Cloud Economics

VMware continues to deliver key capabilities that enable customers to accelerate their migration and modernization journey and further support business resiliency with VMware Cloud on AWS. VMware announces the following enhancements that will help customers migrate and modernize applications while driving better cloud economics from VMware Cloud on AWS.

New i3en.metal Instance: this new host type is based on 2nd generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors. It's designed for storage-dense workloads with high-performance requirements and delivers superior economics at scale for data center migration and disaster recovery transformation projects. These new instances deliver 4x the raw storage capacity at roughly half the cost per GB of storage per host of current offerings. In addition, it comes with low latency Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) SSD capacity for applications that require high random I/O access to large amounts of data such as relational databases. Native encryption at the NIC level offers better security for east-west traffic within the SDDC boundaries. Customer can gain even better economics by mixing and matching i3en instances for storage demanding workloads with i3.metal instances for compute/memory demanding workloads.

"The exponential growth of data generation and consumption and the rapid expansion of hyperscale computing necessitate a highly flexible and scalable cloud architecture," said Jason Grebe, corporate vice president and general manager, Intel Cloud and Enterprise Solutions Group. "Second Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors are designed to take full advantage of the scalable memory, storage and network bandwidth offered by VMware Cloud on AWS. Intel has partnered with VMware and AWS to provide customers with a powerful foundation for digital transformation."

2-Host Production Cluster Lowers Starting Cost by 33%: The 2-host cluster provides a new, smaller minimum environment for production workloads, enabling even more customers, partners, and managed service providers (MSPs) to get started with VMware Cloud on AWS. The 2-host cluster is ideal for proving the value of VMware Cloud on AWS and reducing cost of getting started. With the 2-host cluster, customers can get started with persistent VMware Cloud on AWS environments at up to 33 percent lower cost of entry than a 3-host cluster.

Embrace cloud native infrastructure with VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid: Organizations can deploy, scale, and manage containerized applications on VMware Cloud on AWS with the addition of Tanzu Kubernetes Grid. Tanzu Kubernetes Grid packages open source technologies and automation tooling to help customers get up and running quickly with a scalable, multi-cluster Kubernetes environment. With Tanzu Kubernetes Grid on VMware Cloud on AWS, customers can deploy their SDDC in the cloud, with all the required components needed to architect and scale Kubernetes to fit their needs.

Expanded Networking Options: VMware Transit Connect (Preview) will eliminate the hassles of self-deploying and managing complex configurations to establish a connectivity fabric across VMware Cloud on AWS SDDCs, Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (Amazon VPCs), and on-premises environments. The solution, which is based on the AWS Transit Gateway service, is a high-bandwidth, low latency and resilient connectivity solution that will be operationally simple with automated provisioning and controls. The connectivity model automatically scales up/down linearly as new environments are added or removed from a group, providing users with flexibility. Additionally, with support for the industry-leading VMware SD-WAN, users at branches or remote locations can have a better network connectivity to workloads deployed on VMware Cloud on AWS. VMware SD-WAN provides a cloud-delivered, transport-agnostic architecture supporting and optimizing any WAN link or combination of links.

Multi-tenancy lowers MSPs costs, opens new opportunities with SMBs: VMware Cloud Director service provides MSPs with a pay-as-you-grow model, thus reducing the overhead costs to pursue small and medium sized businesses. The service enables partners to provide flexibility in pricing and environment size by dividing their VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC environments into multi-tenanted resource pools, with fine-grained control of resource allocation and support for differing consumption models. MSPs can quickly implement changes to resource pools across hosts and pair regions to support geo-expansion and quickly adapt to changing customer requirements. They can also accelerate time-to-market by reducing operational overhead with familiar management and a consistent experience for their end customers.

Enabling Business Continuity with VMware Cloud on AWS

VMware Cloud on AWS helps businesses alleviate potential disruptions, delivering a seamlessly integrated hybrid cloud environment in under two hours from any of the 17 AWS Regions worldwide, and scaled to support more users, more workloads, and urgent demands in minutes. With Horizon 7 VDI on VMware Cloud on AWS, customers can quickly set up and scale cloud-delivered virtual desktop infrastructure to support remote employees, temporary workers, and contractors. VMware Site Recovery and VMware Cloud on AWS provide infrastructure risk mitigation and enable customers to implement proactive disaster avoidance​. VMware has also announced its intent to acquire Datrium, and, after the deal closes, plans to expand on the performance-optimized VMware Site Recovery disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) solution with a cost-optimized option. For more details about all of VMware's solutions for business continuity, visit here.

VMware Cloud on AWS Customers Share Their Stories

West Windsor-Plainsboro Regional School District in central New Jersey serves approximately 9,900 students. Harry Doctor, technology manager for WW-P school district, said, "We originally selected VMware Cloud on AWS to support disaster preparedness, providing resiliency for our VMware Horizon virtual desktops and other critical applications. When it was confirmed that New Jersey schools would remain closed for the rest of the 2020 school year, we were able to quickly shift strategies and immediately burst our infrastructure using VMware Cloud on AWS to support remote learning for nearly 10,000 students. This service enabled us to respond more than 10 times faster than we could have if we had needed to deploy additional physical servers to support the increased workloads. What would have taken eight weeks took five days, because no additional hardware was required. We were able to keep learning and operations as close to business as usual as possible, even in the face of unprecedented challenges. A lot of people wish they had a deployment like this stood up when the pandemic started."

ZOZO Technologies, Inc supports the R&D and IT operations of ZOZO Inc., including Japan's largest online fashion shopping website, ZOZOTOWN, which the company says offers more than 7,600 brands and 3,000 new items per day for purchase online. Nobuhiko Watanabe, Team Leader, Development Division of ZOZO Technologies, said, "We experience a huge surge in shopping traffic to our website, sometimes more than three to four times the usual traffic on an average day, during seasonal sales. This meant we needed to scale up our IT infrastructure very quickly to ensure a smooth and seamless online retail experience for our customers and over 1,300 store owners. VMware was successful in scaling up to 100 hosts on-demand through VMware Cloud on AWS during the 2019-2020 Christmas / New Year sales period. During the COVID19 quarantine and summer sales event this year, there was an increase in traffic, but we achieved similar success, despite our teams working entirely from home. With VMware Cloud on AWS, we were able to scale up hosts easily and without any disruption. Both successes demonstrate the power of a consistent cloud infrastructure and operations to enable our business to scale on demand and help meet business continuity requirements."