Posted by I was recently asked in an interview what are 5 things I like or that a potential VMC on AWS customer should know. about VMC. I thought I would make a quick list of my 5 benefits of VMC.
1. Agility
The provisioning of new resources is quick and easy. Within 15-20 minutes of adding a new host, it is fully provisioned and ready to use in the cluster. This can be accomplished by manually adding the node or enabling Elastic DRS to add and remove hosts based on utilization.
This allows your VMC to scale on demand to match your resource requirements eliminating the need to wait weeks for hardware to arrive onsite and to be installed.
2. Logical extension of your environment
Once hybrid Link Mode is set up your VMC becomes a logical extension of your onprem datacenter. You are capable of administrating and monitoring your onprem DC and VMC DC from the same vCenter.
This allows for onprem permissions and AD accounts to be used in the VMC. Besides the one plane of management for both environments in the same vCenter you also have the benefit of migrating workloads between onprem and your cloud easy.
3. No T-Shirt Sizing
With VMC on AWS it is treated just like any VMware environment. With IaaS environments they like to offer instances based on pre-canned templates giving you an option to pick between vCPU, Memory, & storage.
With VMC on AWS you can size your VM’s based on the actual workload demand.
I.E. need 2 vCPU, 16GB memory, 60GB VMDK (OS) & 200GB VMDK (Data) then that is what you deploy instead of being put into a box of 4 CPU, 16GB memory, 500GB disk (OS & Data).
4. DRaaS
Leveraging SRM you are able to pick an RPO for your replication window, place VMs in a protection group for consistency and leverage a Recovery Plan to script out the failover of your production environment. My personal best for having production workloads shutdown onprem and powered on and running in the VMC was 25 minutes.
5. Cost Savings
By having your second datacenter live in the cloud you save on the traditional Colo costs or brick and mortar costs of running your own building. You don’t need to go buy hardware you must rack and stack at your second environment to expand. By right sizing your environment and only paying for resources you are utilizing you cut costs by not having to over provision your environment in hopes you grow into it. Finally, you save by having environments you can spin up and tear down as needed for business development instead of running an environment idle when those resources are not needed.
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