When VMware Cloud on AWS was announced in 2017, it was met with trepidation and caution from the industry. Regardless of how successful the platform has been since GA in 2018 there is no doubt it has changed the way in which some organisations approach hardware refreshes or migrations. VMC adds another option if nothing else. The technology that backs the platform is very impressive and focuses on removing the perceived burden of managing physical hosts, vCenter instances and also looks to leverage capacity pain points with host based auto-scalability. With the announcement last week of Google Cloud VMware Engine, VMware has succeeded in having the VMC “brand” available on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform.
VMware Cloud effectively covers the Holy Trinity of Hyper-Scale Cloud Platforms.
What this means for customers is that there is now choice on which to run VMware Cloud deployments that ties in more aligned with their public cloud provider of choice. One of the biggest selling points of a VMC solution is the tighter more direct access into the underlying cloud platforms native services. That includes more direct (and cheaper) access to consume native cloud services offered by each. Now, there is an alignment between what services are being consumed by a customer vs what VMC flavour they chose.
The other interesting aspect for mine in the three offerings being available is that for a migration or on-demand recovery/disaster recovery point of view now provides a more competitive element. How long does each VMC SDDC take to spin up, how complicated is the networking, how well does it perform and scale once deployed, and ultimately how much is it going to cost me to run an SDDC on each one. I’ve done extensive testing with VMware Cloud on AWS so it’s going to be interesting to see the differences once/if I am able to get my hands on the different platforms. Would be interesting to compare the experience across all three.
For a broader discussion on the subject and how VMware Cloud on <insert platform> is viewed upon, have a listen to Episode 5 of the Veeam Product Strategy Live Podcast below:
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