Page 16 - COMPASS, Q1 2017

feature > vmware cloud on aws
The cloud migration process is so seamless, in fact, that VMware will support vMotion to and from the public cloud. In other words, an admin- istrator will be able to migrate a running VM to the public cloud with no service interruption.
LOAD BALANCING
Another major use case for VMware Cloud on AWS will be application load balancing. Presently, VMware offers its Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) as a tool for balancing workloads across VMware hosts within the datacenter. The major limitation to DRS, however, has always been that collec- tively the host servers have a finite capacity. As such, DRS load balancing only works so long as the host servers have the capacity to accommodate the organization’s workloads.
In response to this limitation, VMware is intro- ducing a variation of its DRS, called Elastic
A COMPELLING OFFERING
In the end, this is a very compelling offering for AWS and VMware that will have ramifications beyond today’s native management capabilities. In any service-provisioning model, proper enterprise guardrails need to be in place
to ensure the security, governance and compliance boxes are all checked. Marrying a traditional management plane with a public platform will likely introduce some new quirks
to maintaining these pillars of enterprise production environments. Out of this transition will likely come a whole new set of faster-moving challenges that should be seen as a land of opportunity for any IT professional today. How we place guardrails around public cloud resources to ensure that they meet enterprise requirements is a topic for a whole additional discussion that’s also very relevant to today’s cloud discussions.
Tim Carr is deeply interested in emerging datacenter and automation technologies. In his day job, he works as a solution architect for AHEAD, where he specializes in automation, orchestration and cloud computing platforms for the modern-day datacenter. He’s a VMware Certified Design Expert.
14 vmug > compass Q1 2017
VMWARE ON AWS:
A MATCH MADE IN THE CLOUD?
A CONSULTANT ADDRESSES THE PROS AND CONS OF VMWARE CLOUD ON AMAZON’S PLATFORM.
TIM CARR
I’m having more and more conversations about how different businesses are leveraging Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud resources for either speed of deployment or capacity needs.
That said, a big roadblock to AWS adoption lies in the shortage of skills needed to effectively operationalize this fairly new and complex platform. Thinking about this skill shortage and existing knowledge that many organizations have in the VMware platform makes me think that the “VMware on AWS” play might have some legs to get moving.
I could see this newly announced model as a viable option for organizations with needs to expand global operations into
a geography where they don’t currently own a datacenter.
By leveraging bare-metal services located natively in AWS datacenters, organizations enable this capability to expand existing VMware footprints into new geographies without a site buildout. I question the general viability for customers who have no existing VMware footprint today. Instead, I see these organizations moving toward Software as a Service (SaaS), and if they need to manage infrastructure, more cloud native applications.
WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO GET STARTED?
Pricing for these bare-metal AWS resources plus VMware software can be on-demand or reserved, and can be either billed to a
credit card or wrapped into an existing relationship with VMware or a VMware channel partner, making paying for the solution as frictionless as possible for any organization’s purchasing model. As of today, I haven’t seen pricing for the solution, but I would assume that it would need to be competitive with what enterprises expect out of their own datacenters today for the solution to truly take off.
In the end, most organizations that I’m speaking with aren’t interested in running their existing applications in the cloud. Frankly, without application re-factor, public cloud resources can often be more expensive. But with application re-factor to take advantage of managed services such as Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), the cloud can not only help eliminate cost, but also manage complexity for the application. One can argue that getting existing applications closer to these native Amazon-managed services could also be a great use case for existing VMware shops. Could we be introducing a model of hybrid-lift-and-shift to the cloud?