I’d like to share some background on extending your on-premises infrastructure to the cloud with VMware Cloud on AWS.
One or more of these scenarios may sound familiar to you:
- Facing geographic capacity needs (such as data sovereignty rules or the need to be closer to their end users) and do not want to invest in building out a new data center
- Coping with capacity constraints on-premises to handle seasonal spikes in demand
- Handling unplanned temporary capacity needs or need capacity for new projects and do not want to invest in over provisioning or in building new capacity on-premises
- Adding and extending on-premises desktop services without buying additional hardware
- Developing new applications that need to integrate with on-premises applications or access native cloud services
- Needing to perform test and development activities in a cloud environment that is operationally similar to on-premises environments
When customers try to extend their existing on-premises environment to the cloud, they face many challenges. A few of these may sound familiar, as well.
- Interoperability between the environments:Need application re-architecting/refactoring, machine format conversion etc when migrating to cloud
- Incompatible skills, tools and processes:Infrastructure and operations teams must learn new skills, acquire different tools, and change existing processes to maximize the benefits of public cloud integration.
- Management of disparate infrastructures:Inconsistent management tools that operate in isolation across on-premises and cloud environments
- Bi-directional application mobility is complex and costly:Once applications move to public cloud; it is virtually impossible to move them back on-premises without a significant reverse rework that makes the migration very costly and time-consuming
- Inconsistent security and governance:The differences between on-premises and public cloud infrastructure limits the reuse of established security and governance procedures and tools.
We took all of this in mind when architecting VMware Cloud on AWS. Here are some specific ways that we can overcome the obstacles listed above.
- VMware Cloud on AWS extends your on-premises infrastructure to the cloud, with same vSphere hypervisor that runs tens of millions of workloads. It is available on a dedicated, bare-metal EC2(Elastic Compute Cloud) instance in the AWS Cloud, and therefore no redesign is required to migrate applications. It saves migration cost, time and complexity and makes bi-directional migration simple and easy
- With VMware Cloud on AWS, customers can leverage familiar and proven VMware skills, tools and processes in the cloud, so there is no need to learn new skills or acquire new tools
- VMware vCenter, a widely-used and proven management tool used by infrastructure administrators across the world to operate their on-premises vSphere infrastructure, is the management tool for VMware Cloud on AWS and provides consistent operations for vCenter administrators
- Applications require no redesign to migrate to VMware Cloud on AWS, saving on migration cost, time and complexity that allows for seamless bi-directional migration
- With VMware Cloud on AWS, customers can extend their current on-premises security and governance policies to the cloud
Hopefully this gives you some confidence in our ability to extend your on-premises infrastructure to the cloud. In other blogs in this series, I offer a brief intro to VMware Cloud on AWS and explore key considerations for cloud migration.
