Article The 4 Major Use Cases of VMware Cloud on AWS
According to IDC, VMware commands 80.7% of worldwide virtual machine software and 65% of organisations have a hybrid cloud strategy.
By Insight UK / 3 Sep 2019 / Topics: Cloud
By Insight UK / 3 Sep 2019 / Topics: Cloud
As businesses accelerate public cloud adoption, there is a need for innovative ways to move workloads into the public cloud that will guarantee return on investment and eliminate undifferentiated heavy lifting. To meet this customer demand, VMware and AWS went into partnership to launch VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC). This technology is arguably the industry leading solution that enables a true hybrid cloud deployment for your workloads. The solution consists of the VMware software defined data centre (SDDC) running on AWS bare metal infrastructure, and provided as a managed service to customers by VMware.
As an Advanced Consulting Partner of AWS, VMware Premier Partner, and one of the largest VMware aggregators in Europe, Insight has been able to effectively deliver this solution to our clients. Throughout these projects we have identified four key use cases:
As enterprises adopt a cloud first strategy with the aim of also moving legacy applications to the cloud, there is a fundamental question on which of the 6 migration strategies to adopt for each application. A simple lift and shift (rehost) is not always the right answer to all applications as it may result in considerable cost to run the application in the cloud. In many cases, these applications will need to be rearchitected or re-platformed which will require a longer project duration to deliver.
However, with VMware Cloud on AWS, legacy applications that have been running on a VMware environment on-premise can easily be rehosted on the AWS environment using the vMotion or HCX technologies (literally with a click of a button). It provides the entry route for enterprises to deploy application on AWS which can subsequently be re-architected or re-platformed to leverage native AWS services.
In addition, existing VMware tools and skillsets can support the migration and operation of the VMware environment, while in parallel re-skilling the team on native AWS services. This use case is suitable for businesses considering a move away from managing physical infrastructures or those that require a consolidated environment for multiple data centres.
Prior to VMC, enterprises that require additional capacity either to support seasonal traffic, test & dev environments or business growth will require a new data centre setting up which usually involves a lengthy lead time to procure the physical infrastructure and to setup the environment.
However, VMC provides the flexibility and agility for businesses to provision a VMware SDDC in a matter of hours to support the additional capacity required.
Businesses with seasonal traffic can now provision resources on-demand to support the additional traffic and retire the resources afterwards. Test & dev environments can be spun up to support new product development which will only be required for the initial development and launch. Lastly, businesses can grow even faster by utilising VMC and benefitting from a scalable and flexible capacity to support expansion and global reach of products and services.
Disaster recovery is a concept that is usually neglected or overlooked by businesses until there is an outage and potential loss to revenue. Traditionally, this is due to the financial commitment required to stand up and operate a data centre that probably will be used for only a couple of days in the year.
With VMware Cloud on AWS, there is no longer a need for the considerable upfront capital outlay for a disaster recovery site given that an environment can be spun up to support a critical workload only when required.
VMware Site Recovery is delivered as an add-on service to VMware Cloud on AWS. VMware Site Recovery, an industry-leading recovery plan automation solution, brings trusted replication, orchestration and automation technologies to VMware Cloud on AWS to protect applications in the event of site failures. The service provides an end-to-end disaster recovery solution enabling customers to apply cloud economics with an elastic environment.
Rehosting or re-architecting enterprise applications, for example SAP and Oracle workloads, with the aim of moving these applications to native AWS can be challenging. However, enterprises with a cloud first strategy are keen to move these applications off an existing on-premises data centre. The simplest route out that will eliminate the migration complexities is to rehost these applications on VMware Cloud on AWS.
Furthermore, businesses that deliver desktop and applications through a VDI solution can deploy VMware Horizon 7 or other third party VDI solutions (e.g. Citrix) on VMware Cloud on AWS to deliver a consolidated VDI solutions utilising the global reach of AWS to get close to the users.
Furthermore, using the Cloud Pod Architecture (CPA), existing on-premises VMware Horizon solution can be extended to VMC in a hybrid mode to increase the capacity and scale horizontally with additional users.
Insight has developed a set of professional services to enable businesses to accelerate the adoption of VMware Cloud on AWS. Setting up and deploying applications on VMC requires expert skill and experience to architect, design and implement the cloud environment. These services include the following:
These services can be tailored to provide clients with the required support across the various stages of the setup of VMC and migration of application.
If you are interested in finding out more, please contact your Insight Account Manager or get in touch via our contact form here.
Now read: Using Native AWS Services with VMware Cloud on AWS.
