VMware Cloud on AWS has been around for a couple of years now and has improved over time by providing new services and expanding regularly to more regions across the world.

VMware’s cloud solutions is now getting better and we’ll go through some of the new features and capabilities announced at VMWorld 2020 that will be available soon.

Recap

Before going any further and see what’s waiting for with on VMC on AWS, let’s quickly review the different use cases of that solution.

1. Disaster Recovery: to build a new DR, replace the existing one or simply add a second DR site.
2. Data Center extension: to allow customers to extend their data center to the public cloud for test/dev purposes, do VDI, or to simply step by step experience and move to the public cloud.
3. Cloud Migrations: to perform a full migration of your on-prem infrastructure to VMC on AWS or refresh your infrastructure and get rid of your old on-prems platform.
4. Next-generation apps: to start build modern apps or hybrid applications

So, What’s New in VMware Cloud on AWS

Let’s start with “TRIM/UNMAP” integration

With VMC on AWS powered by vSAN, reclaiming guest OS capacity will be possible by initiating TRIM/UNMAP commands.

Note that this feature is still in preview and that any modification is subject to change by VMware, but we have good hopes that it’s gonna be live.

HCX Replication Assisted vMotion

vMotion is getting better with HCX in VMC on AWS to provide more flexibility to move large amount of workloads and doing parallel live migrations, but also continuous replication between multiple SDDCs.

HCX Mobility Optimized Networking

HCX Mobility is enhanced and can optimize networking between a source and a target datacenter to automatically route VMs that need to be migrated.

HCX Migration Planning With Mobility Groups

VMs and applications can be logically organized as a group in what VMware calls a “Mobility Group”, so that they can be migrated together and stay closed to each other. This is particulary benefial for application that have dependencies with each other.

vCenter Linking within an SDDC Group

For a better organization and ease of management of workloads, it will be possible to link multiple vCenter servers within a SDDC group and manage them in a single console view.

And of course, search and management of VM across the entire inventory will be possible including cloning and cold migration as well as sharing custom information such as tags across all groups.

This feature is quite similiar to ELM (Enhanced Link Mode) in vSphere for an on-prem infrastructure but for multiple SDDCs in VMC on AWS.

Wrap up

We saw some interesting new features in VMware Cloud on AWS that should be available in Q3’FY 2021. Note again that the features mentionned above are subject to change if VMware decide to do so but I’m pretty sure we’ll see them released very soon.

Hope you enjoyed that blogpost and stay tune.