VMware Cloud on AWS (VMConAWS) VMworld 2020 Announcements

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It is hard to believe it has been four years since VMware announced VMware Cloud on AWS.  In the past four years there have been massive improvements to this offering by VMware and AWS.  At VMworld 2020 new features and roadmaps are being announced.  Below you will find a brief overview of what VMConAWS is followed by an overview of the announcements being made over the next couple of days.

Other VMworld 2020 announcements:
https://digitalthoughtdisruption.com/2020/09/29/vmware-bringing-sase-to-sd-wan-vmworld-2020/
https://digitalthoughtdisruption.com/2020/09/29/vmware-vrealize-network-insight-vrni-vmworld-2020-announcements/
https://digitalthoughtdisruption.com/2020/09/29/vmware-nsx-t-advanced-threat-prevention-announcements-at-vmworld-2020/
https://digitalthoughtdisruption.com/2020/09/29/importance-of-vmware-nsx-t-in-the-modern-datacenter-vmworld-2020/
https://digitalthoughtdisruption.com/2020/09/29/vmware-cloud-on-aws-vmconaws-vmworld-2020-announcements/
https://digitalthoughtdisruption.com/2020/09/29/vmware-cloud-disaster-recovery-draas-vmworld-2020/
https://digitalthoughtdisruption.com/2020/09/29/vmware-vrealize-ai-cloud-vmworld-2020/
https://digitalthoughtdisruption.com/2020/09/29/vmware-vrealize-cloud-universal-vmworld-2020/
https://digitalthoughtdisruption.com/2020/09/29/vmware-cloud-on-dell-emc-vxrail-vmworld-2020/

To stay up to date on all the latest features and upcoming releases go to:

Brief recap of what VMConAWS offers

By having VMware both onprem and in AWS it allows for you to have a unified eco-system.  This allows for seamless migrations from onprem to the cloud and vice versa.

You won’t have to re-train your staff to learn a new hypervisor way of doing things.

Move to a as a service OPEX model way of doing business at your secondary locations.

It makes for a great environment to run pilot Kubernetes environments or run your production K8s.

Finally, it allows you to natively access AWS services from your VMC on AWS.

These are just four great use cases to start your journey to VMConAWS

Whether you are needing your first DR target or want to move your brick and mortar to the cloud and recoup savings from not having to run a second physical datacenter.

Have you ever had uncontrollable growth in your environment and apps are demanding more resources and the expansion hardware hasn’t arrived yet?  VMConAWS makes a great extension of your current onprem datacenter to serve these requirements.

VMConAWS makes a great environment for modern apps by providing a K8s ready environment for Tanzu and the ability to access AWS native services from your VMConAWS environment.

The above are some of the new features and enhancements that will be coming soon.

The above enhancements and features are targeting to make VMConAWS more efficient, improve storage savings, increase in performance, network scalability, and deeper integration into the overall VMware eco-system.

I3en.metal instance types are now available to allow for bigger and beefer hosts in the cloud.

These hosts are great for your more demanding workloads.

TRIM/UNMAP is now in preview to help reclaim guest OS capacity in the cloud.

This option will help reclaim storage from thinly provisioned VMDKs that have grown and the additional capacity is no longer required on your vSAN workload datastores.

Coming in 2021 is improvements to HCX for bulk migrations and the ability for continuous replication.

Works with older releases of vSphere.  Always consult the latest documentation for exact releases.

Manipulate the routing so workloads that have been migrated to the cloud can use the gateway in the cloud if it is appropriate to cut down on hair pinning situations.

Migrate workloads over to VMConAWS in waves so you can keep your applications together for those multi-tier apps that have multiple VMs and networks associated with them.

This is not HLM (hybrid link mode)

When you log into a single vCenter you’ll see all the vCenters in this link.  It doesn’t require any additional setup on the customer side. 

Summary:
As you can see a lot of great announcements today at VMworld 2020 on the VMConAWS solution by VMware.  I was a customer of VMConAWS back in 2017 and to have watched its evolution over the past three years has been amazing.  If you are wanting to dip your toe into cloud as a secondary datacenter or need a DR target or want to start a modern application practice; VMConAWS is a great place to start.  As always, I hope y’all found this helpful.

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