VMware Cloud Briefing Event

Today, VMware held an online Cloud Briefing Event in which updates to the VMware cloud strategy were announced. Most prominently, VMware announced general availability of the VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) service in Europe. The first region is London and additional regions are already on the horizon. Besides the global expansion of the service, VMware also announced various updates and improvements:

Stretched cluster across Availability Zones

One of the big improvements to VMC is the support for stretched vSAN clusters across Availability Zones. For me personally, this is definitely a critical update to the service because AWS Availability Zones (AZ) do go down on occasion. Single AZ deployments do not meet mission critical availability and recoverability requirements. VMC now delivers enterprise grade availability for mission-critical workloads. Awesome!

Infrastructure as Code

You can now fully automate the SDDC deployment in VMC by using Infrastructure as code. VMware now supports AWS Cloud Formation and Terraform. This is really, really awesome! You can deploy an entire SDDC just by deploying a YAML template.

Horizon 7 Support for VMware Cloud on AWS

VMware also announced support for Cloud Pod Architecture extension into VMC. You can now deploy Horizon 7 across on-premises and VMC using Cloud Pod Architecture.

VMware Cost Insight Support for VMware Cloud on AWS

To ease cloud migration planning, VMware’s cloud service Cost Insight now supports VMC. You can calculate capacity requirements and plot your cloud migration from a financial viewpoint.

VMware Log Intelligence for VMware Cloud on AWS

This new solution provides realtime  log management for VMware Cloud on AWS. It delivers full visibility into  audit logs and application logs for faster troubleshooting. It supports any source that has support for Syslog.