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Figure 2. Putting Elastic DRS into automatic mode (screenshot courtesy of Frank Denneman).
DRS. Elastic DRS will be able to make cloud-based VMware hosts available to the resource-balancing process, as shown in Figure 2. As such, VMware Cloud on AWS can be used as a tool for absorbing tem- porary demand spikes through the use of elastic load balancing.
WORKLOAD SPIKES
The VMware Cloud will also be useful for those who need to accommodate temporary workloads, which are different from tem- porary demand spikes. Take the insurance industry, for example. Health insurers are commonly subjected to an annual open enrollment period, during which policy- holders might make changes to their policy selection or enroll in a new plan. From an insurer’s point of view, coping with the open enrollment period can be a massive undertaking. The open enrollment period commonly requires an insurer to hire large numbers of temporary workers and dra- matically scale its computing resources to accommodate temporary workloads.
In the past, open enrollment periods were enormously expensive for large insurers, because accommodating the demand often meant purchasing and provisioning new hardware. In recent years, insurers have begun hosting open enrollment-related workloads in public clouds in an effort to reduce costs; but even this had its challenges. With VMware Cloud on AWS, however, it will become possible for insurers (or anyone else who needs to run a temporary workload) to host the workload in the public cloud, while managing the workload in the same manner used for workloads running within the organi- zation’s own datacenter.
VIVA LA REVOLUCION!
VMware Cloud on AWS is revolutionary. Although hybrid clouds have existed for many years, they have been anything but seamless. VMware Cloud on AWS will—for the first time—allow organizations tomanageon-premisesandcloud-basedresourcesinaconsistent and seamless manner.
Brien Posey is a seven-time Microsoft MVP with more than two decades of IT experience. As a freelance writer, Posey has written thousands of articles and written or contributed to several dozen books on a wide variety of IT topics. Prior to going freelance, Posey was a CIO for a national chain of hospitals and health carefacilities.Hehasalsoservedasanetworkadministratorforsomeofthe country’s largest insurance companies and for the Department of Defense at Fort Knox. You can visit his personal Web site at brienposey.com.
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