Page 15 - COMPASS, Q1 2017

benefit to using vCenter is, of course, that administrators are able to use a manage- ment tool they’re already familiar with. If an administrator knows how to create a new VM in the organization’s own datacenter, then they already know how to create a VM within the VMware Cloud. As an added bonus, vCenter can easily be configured to expose the organization’s cloud-based resources, as well as its on-premises resources, through a single pane of glass.
Obviously, there are huge benefits to being able to manage on-premises and public cloud environments in a consistent manner, using a single tool. Even so, you can’t help but ask the question of what becomes of the AWS cloud. It stands to reason that if VMware is running natively within the AWS cloud, the cloud-based VMware hosts aren’t serving up traditional AWS services.
LEVERAGING AMAZON
Even so, the cloud-based VMware hosts exist in parallel with AWS services. Because of this, cloud-based VMware VMs are able to leverage AWS services just as easily as a native AWS EC2 instance would be able to. VMware VMs running in the cloud can, for instance, access data residing within AWS S3 storage. Similarly, a VMware VM running on VMware Cloud on AWS is able to perform queries against databases that are running natively within AWS.
Although VMware Cloud on AWS is currently in preview, general availability is expected within the coming months, and organiza- tions should begin considering possible use cases for it.
Because of the way that the VMware Cloud on AWS has been designed, any workload that can run on a VMware server should theoretically be able to run on it. In reality, however, there are some important consid- erations that must be taken into account.
A BIG ENOUGH PIPE
As with any cloud service, one of the most important considerations is the available
Internet bandwidth. It’s possible, for example, to split a multi-tier application so that some of the application’s virtual servers run in the public cloud, while others continue running in the organization’s own datacenter. When doing so, however, admins must consider the volume of traffic flowing between the virtual servers, and whether the organization’s Internet connectivity will be able to comfortably absorb this additional traffic.
Just as network traffic volume is a consideration, so, too, is the application’s sensitivity to latency. Moving an application tier to the public cloud will presumably result in increased latency. While this may not be a big deal for some services (such as Web front-ends), databases can be especially sensitive to latency. As such, workloads shouldbemigratedwithaneyetowardtheimpactthatthemigration will have on the application’s performance.
Despite such limitations, there are a number of different ways in which an organization might use VMware Cloud on AWS. One of the most popular uses will be to relieve congestion within the data- center. Organizations whose on-premises virtualization hosts are being stretched thin will be able to increase the available capacity within their datacenter by migrating some of their VMs to VMware Cloud on AWS.
This raises a very important point. In the past, migrating workloads to the public cloud has been a complex undertaking. Often times, such migrations have required an application server to be completely rebuilt to ensure the virtual server’s compatibility with the public cloud environment. As if that weren’t enough, the workload itself might need to be modified because it will be running on a different network subnet, and within a different security context.
WORKLOAD MIGRATION
The ease with which workloads can be migrated to the public cloud and brought back on-premises is probably the No. 1 argument in favor of using VMware Cloud on AWS. Existing VMware VMs can be run on VMware Cloud on AWS servers without requiring any sort of modification. This is possible because VMware stretches the organization’s existing virtual network to the cloud through NSX, its software-defined networking technology.
Figure1.ArchitecturaloverviewofVMwareCloudonAmazonWebServices.
On-Premises
VMware Cloud on AWS
AWS Cloud
VMware vCenter
vSphere Virtual SAN NSX
ESXI
Dedicated AWS Infrastructure
vmug.com 13