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VMware and Amazon Web Services (AWS) will partnering together to bring a new a VMware vSphere-based service, running on the AWS Cloud, that will make it easier and faster to run applications, across a hybrid cloud environment.

It’s called the “VMware Cloud on AWS”. The infrastructure looks like:

The VMware Cloud on AWS includes the following components:

vCenter. The environment is managed by a vCenter that is running in the cloud or on-premises.
ESXi on dedicated hardware in AWS Cloud (no nesting is used!).
Virtual SAN offers shared storage with replication and DR orchestration.
NSX for spanning on-premises and cloud using advanced network and security services.

This service is delivered, operated, sold and supported by VMware. Low level infrastructure management such as installing patches on ESXi servers and upgrading the vCenter is done by VMware.

The vSphere Web Client is based on HTML5 protocol. In the Web Client the on-premises datacenter and VMware AWS cloud is listed (single pane of glass).

Other CLI tools such as PowerCLI can be used against the environment.

When you want to resize a on-premises cluster you need to buy extra hardware (server, network and disk capacity) to resize the cluster. In the AWS datacenter you can simple select the “resize” option.

This option demonstrates the flexibility and elastic scalability of the AWS cloud.

Below is the location map of the AWS regions that support the VMware Cloud datacenters:

The on-premises datacenter can be connect to the AWS datacenters using IPsec tunnels or direct connect to create a hybrid cloud.

Some use cases are:

Maintain and Expand the to the VMware Cloud on AWS
Consolidate and migrate to the VMware Cloud on AWS
Workload Flexibility between the on-premises an AWS cloud

During VMworld Europe 2016 more information wil be available on the VMware Cloud on AWS partnership.

To deliver IT as a Service, VMware has for the coming year(s) the following focus areas:

Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC). See the VMworld 2013 SDDC recap here Link
End User Computing (EUC). See the VMworld 2013 EUC recap here Link
vCloud Hybrid Services (vCHS)

In this last blog post I dig deeper in vCloud Hybrid Services (vCHS) and DAAS announcements.

Desktop-As-A-Service (DAAS)

VMware acquired Desktone to enter the Desktop-As-A-Service (DAAS) market. Desktone offers:

Self Service of virtual desktops. Simple provisioning from the cloud enables self-service for IT of full VDI, shared session remote desktop service (RDS) desktops and applications without the need to procure hardware or software.
Multi-tenancy. Each customer gets a separate virtual environment to ensure security while cloud providers are able to manage multiple customers under one platform.
Grid-based architecture for elastic scalability. Advanced architecture enables unlimited scalability across multiple geographies and data centers.
Low cost of delivery. Open source based technology eliminates Microsoft licensing fees and third-party software management, resulting in cost savings over competitive desktop virtualization offerings.

The Desktone broker can scale much larger than a VMware Horizon View broker. So it is much more suitable as multi-tenant solution. Another point is that Desktone supports multiple OSes such as Windows Server, Windows Client and Linux as VDI desktop. These desktops can be managed from a single portal, while customer have there own portal in multi-tenant environment.

With Desktone, VMware partners can offer a Desktop-As-A-Service to there customers.

vCloud Hybrid Services (vCHS)

VMware vCloud Hybrid Service, built on VMware vSphere. This enables customers to extend the same applications, networking, management, operations and tools across both on-premises and off-premises environments (private cloud). vCHS is the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) public cloud service from VMware.

You can choose two flavors:

Dedicated Cloud. This option is fully isolated. You get your own vCloud Director instance.
Virtual Private Cloud. This option runs on physical servers with VMs from other tenants. It is fully isolated from each other.

See the picture below what are the minimum starting resources:

When you choose for example a dedicate cloud you start with 30GHz vCPU, 120GB vRAM, 6 TB disk space etc. You pay for Compute, 24 x7 support, persistent disk(s) and the bandwidth you use. Services as firewalls, load balancers, VPNs, DHCP. NAT and redundancy such as HA are free.

VMware will offer a private beta of vCloud Hybrid Service in the United Kingdom (Slough) in Q4, with general availability (GA) planned in Q1 2014.

VMware vCloud Management Marketplace (CMM)

VMware vCloud Management Marketplace (CMM) is a single place were VMware and partners can put there solutions such as Orchestration Plug-ins, Management Packs, Blueprints and Content Packs . Customers can browse and download these tested and validated solutions in there environment.

The Marketplace can be found here link.