​VMware Cloud on AWS in Asia-Pacific now live out of Sydney

VMware has on Monday announced the availability of VMware Cloud on AWS for customers in Australia and New Zealand.

The offering is available already, having quietly launched earlier this month out of the Amazon Web Services' (AWS) Asia Pacific (Sydney) region, nearly two years after the pair of companies announced they were joining forces.

"In just under a year since launching VMware Cloud on AWS, we have met our goal of making the service available in all geographic regions," VMware Australia and New Zealand vice president and managing director Alister Dias said.

"Now this service is available in our region. Local customers will find it extremely easy to migrate to VMware Cloud on AWS, as it provides enterprises with the fastest and most cost-effective way to migrate their mission-critical applications, or even entire datacentres, to the cloud."

VMware Cloud on AWS runs VMware's enterprise-class software-defined datacentre (SDDC) on the AWS cloud, allowing customers to run any application across public, private, or hybrid cloud environments.

With the service, VMware's vSphere, VSAN, and NSX all run on the AWS cloud. The service is optimised to run on dedicated, bare metal AWS infrastructure.

Speaking with journalists in Sydney, Dias, alongside AWS Australia and New Zealand managing director Paul Migliorini, said the companies have been working together on the local offering for a little over two years.

"Naturally, we wanted to be first with this service, but that was probably not going to happen ... we have had the luxury of getting ready [for the launch], particularly over the last 12 months, and to work with our customers for this offering," Dias added.

According to Migliorini, customers in Australia are keen to move more workloads to the public cloud.

"The velocity of what we're seeing across enterprise in Australia and New Zealand is doing nothing but going up," Migliorini explained.

"Customers are seeking to innovate faster, they're seeking to leverage the power of their data more effectively, and as a big part of that they're seeking to remove the friction that's associated with legacy platforms like datacentres and legacy hardware, and so increasingly what they want to do is move large amounts of their workloads to the public cloud.

"We think this is so powerful, as it allows them to move large amounts of workloads to the public cloud with minimal to no disruption to their existing application environment and they solve a whole bunch of other problems in their business."

Migliorini said AWS and VMware have a "huge overlap" in their customer base already, and have been speaking to many together, with Dias adding that customers are telling the companies they want to be able to provide public cloud-like services from their private cloud.

"What we've really seen in the market in the last two years is an evolution of customers acknowledging what they need to do on-prem, and what they'd ideally like to move off-prem," Dias added.

"We've seen many of our customers now exploit VMware Cloud Management Platform and the software-defined stack to run a private cloud and use different capabilities and various forms of automation to move workloads off-prem.

"They're fundamentally telling us they want to create those next killer apps, they want to modernise apps, but what they want to be able to provide for their internal customers [is] a consistent cloud infrastructure with a consistent experience in operating and providing that service."

Asia-Pacific launch partners include Accenture, CCL, CSA, Data#3, Datacom, Dimension Data, DXC Technology, Fujitsu, IBM, Outcomex, Parallo, Perfekt, Revera, Telstra, and Rackspace.

Ahead of VMworld in Las Vegas this week, VMware announced a handful of updates to VMware Cloud on AWS.

Updates include the live migration of thousands of VMs with zero downtime with the ability to schedule when to cutover to the new cloud environment with VMware NSX Hybrid Connect; application-centric security with VMware NSX; NSX/AWS Direct Connect integration; real-time log management; new custom CPU core count capabilities; and a 50 percent reduction in entry price, offering also a three-host minimum SDDC configuration aimed at smaller organisations.

Services in the AWS Asia-Pacific (Sydney) region, Elastic DRS, Log Intelligence Service, and Cost Insight Migration Assessment are all available today. The three-host configuration, Custom CPU core count, VM-Host Affinity, new NSX Hybrid Connect capabilities, EBS support, the Amazon EC2 R5.metal instance type, NSX and AWS Direct Connect integration, and NSX micro-segmentation are in preview.

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