Some exciting news came out of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and VMware last year with the announcement of VMware Cloud on AWS. VMware has been the bedrock of enterprise virtualization and the leading software-as-a-datacenter for years. AWS presented the world with a new way to think about datacenters and quickly became a leader in cloud computing. A limiting factor in using AWS was the vast differences in how AWS and VMware worked to accomplish similar tasks. You will find the same buzz words, such as snapshots, but not the same actions from them. This has presented the industry with a vast jump to not only prepare the technology in their datacenters to work in a new way for AWS, but to also train their staff on a new technology toolset. These issues ultimately led to a high cost of migration from an on-prem VMware environment to AWS.

What if we could dramatically reduce that high migration cost? What if we could take everything that was currently achieved in VMware in an on-prem datacenter, but suddenly achieve it the same way in VMware hosted on AWS? That is exactly what VMware and AWS have provided us in this new partnership. Instead of converting technology from VMware to AWS, we can simply vMotion them in minutes, similar to what has been done for years inside of the on-prem datacenters. Instead of picking VMware or AWS, we combine the technologies and create a true hybrid cloud.

The potential of this partnership is impressive and certainly something to follow. It is currently in Technical Preview, meaning it is not suggested for use in a production system yet. Once finalized, however, it has the potential of changing how we think about datacenters and the cost involved in migrations from them.

If you’re planning a migration and need a partner to get it done, contact us. We’d love to talk to you.