In its third release since launching last summer, VMware Cloud on AWS today added its fourth Amazon Web Services region — AWS Europe (Frankfurt) — and a starter version for the hybrid cloud service. The latter gives users a 30-day, single-host software-defined data center (SDDC) configuration and costs less than a fourth of the price of the usual four-host offering.
“We’re also talking about planned availability in AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) region in Q3,” said Sai Gopalan, product line marketing manager for VMware Cloud on AWS.
Before this release, customers had to buy a minimum cluster size of four hosts. The new single-host option “essentially means customers can provision a VMware SDDC and prove the value of VMware Cloud on AWS within their environment,” Gopalan said.
The starter version comes with most of the features of the four-host SDDC with a few restrictions. “You will not have failover, and you will not be able to vMotion [live migration] between hosts within a cluster because it’s just one host,” Gopalan said.
Of course, VMware’s betting that customers will like it and then upgrade to a larger configuration. So it’s making it as easy as possible to do this. “Within those 30 days, it’s a very simple one click to upgrade to a four-host cluster without losing any of your data,” Gopalan said.
The virtualization giant today also announced several other new features for the hybrid cloud service. These include adding its virtual desktop product Horizon to VMware Cloud on AWS, and compliance with the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), HIPAA, and a handful of industry-standard security certifications.
Stretched Clusters Now Live
Back in March, VMware previewed Stretched Clusters for VMware Cloud on AWS. Today it announced the capability is generally available. This feature aims to protect mission-critical applications against data center and availability zone outages, as well as host and virtual machine (VM) failures. It facilitates zero-RPO infrastructure availability for mission-critical applications and enables zero-RPO failover of workloads within clusters spanning two AWS Availability Zones.
Customers can also migrate workloads between hosts in a stretched cluster across two AWS availability zones.
“What Stretched Clusters does is it allows IT teams to tell developers that they don’t really need to worry about application availability,” Gopalan said. “Instead developers can focus their time and efforts on building core business capabilities. You can imagine a completely new paradigm of application availability.”
New Features In Preview
VMware also announced a couple new features in preview.
This includes vCenter Cloud Gateway, a new on-premises virtual appliance that gives customers a single view and hybrid management of both on-premises workloads and VMware Cloud on AWS resources from on premises.
Additionally, SDDC Save and Restore reduces configuration time by allowing customers to save their VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC configurations if they delete them. And then they can re-deploy an SDDC using these saved configurations at a later date.