re:Invent 2017 – VMware and AWS Announce Updates on Their Hybrid Cloud VMware Cloud On AWS. This three-month-old hybrid cloud offering, which allows customers to run their on-premises vSphere environments in the Amazon Web Services (AWS), cloud, is seeing a series of improvements. The improvements were announced Tuesday at the AWS conference in Las Vegas. Some are available immediately, while others will arrive in February next year during VMware’s fiscal fourth-quarter. AWS’ Northern Virginia region now has VMware Cloud on AWS available. It was initially only available in the Oregon region. New one-year and three-year subscription options are also available immediately. The only way to pay for the product previously was by the hour. Customers with existing on-premises licenses of its vSphere, NSX, and vSAN products will also be eligible for discounts. VMware announced that these discounts are available under VMware’s Hybrid Loyalty program and can potentially save customers 25%. VMware Site Recovery is an optional add-on that VMware says “delivers protection between customer informationcenters and VMware Cloud On AWS or between environments running under separate AWS Availability Zones. (AZs). VMware now supports Wavefront, which allows customers to view, alert upon, troubleshoot, and visualize applications running on VMware Cloud. Application Migration A new capability will allow customers to migrate their applications from their VMware environments on-premises to VMware Cloud on AWS. This will be possible without the need to reconfigure or experience any disruptions. According to VMware, this capability will be possible using a combination of VMware vSphere vMotion and new L2 stretched networking features as well as AWS Direct Connect. VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension is also in development. This SaaS addon, which is available in preview as of Tuesday, aims to enable organizations to move large numbers of applications from their on premises datacenters to VMware Cloud on AWS. It will not cause any downtime. VMware stated that Hybrid Cloud Extension will offer Layer 2 extensions with high-performance, built-in performance so customers can keep the same routing policies, IP, and networks in place while moving workloads. This eliminates the need to do extensive application dependency mapping when migrating apps to VMware Cloud on AWS. Scalability VMware stated that it plans to add multi-cluster support for VMware Cloud on AWS to allow customers to support more resource-intensive workloads. The company stated that VMware Cloud on AWS supports 32 host-clusters and multiple software defined data centers (SDDCs) per organization. It will soon support 10 clusters per SDDC. Customers will be able to support thousands of virtual machines within their environments with the new update. “The momentum for VMware Cloud is growing rapidly, VMware and AWS have delivering major new capabilities within three months of availability, while enhancing our strategic relation with new integrations across our platforms,” Mark Lohmeyer (Vice President and General Manager of VMware’s Cloud Platform Business) stated in a prepared statement regarding the new improvements. Customers of VMware Cloud on AWS can migrate their application portfolios faster to the cloud with Hybrid Cloud Extension or AWS Direct Connect. This will allow them to maintain the highest levels of performance, scale, and availability for mission-critical applications. More information from AWS reInvent 2017: