On-Prem, Off-Prem, Public Cloud, Private Cloud, Hybrid Cloud… which one is the best? The winner is… THE APPLICATION!
That’s a joke, well not really, but you get it. Unfortunately, I am not here to answer what the best of those pillars is for you today. Sorry about that! No, what I want to talk about today is that of a new service from VMWare and Amazon Web Services called VMWare Cloud on AWS, which we just highlighted in our new SEV Ops video!
So… what in the world is this whole VMWare Cloud on AWS thing?
The first thing that we need to understand is that this is an ever expanding offering, and this post will be used to run through the highlights of the offering as it stands today. Expect that there will be further deep dives later on into the individual components discussed here, and those added in the future.
At the base layer, VMWare on AWS (VMWonAWS) is taking VMWare’s Cloud Foundation (VMWCF) with vRealize and deploying them on bare metal inside of the AWS data centers around the world. A key point to understand is that this is a service sold, operated, and supported by VMWare and its partners as an on-demand service with flexible consumption models. All of this, while also retaining access to NATIVE AWS services where needed or desired!
Breaking down the VMWare Hybrid Cloud (VMWHC) offering further to its individual components and we have the core virtual infrastructure components that we know and love from our friends over at VMWare. The core building blocks lay out like this: vSphere to handle the compute functions, NSX for the networking layer, and vSAN to manage the storage. Those three core pieces are then wrapped around in a management layer known as VMWare’s SDDC Manager (Software Defined Data Center), and finally take VMCF a step further with another wrapper in the form of vRealize. Essentially, do what many of us wish to do in a greenfield (read: never going to happen) environment and wrap all of VMWare’s products in a nice pretty bow and we have VMWHC.
That is what we have going on way up in the clouds, but what about back on-prem? I have a pretty strong core belief that we tend to over rotate in our industry. We have done so with many different trends like containers, cloud, flash technology, networking, hyper-converged infrastructure, etc.. the list goes on and on. This isn’t really an issue, but more of a statement of reality in that even if the hype meter never drains fully, we do tend to work together to bring things back into perspective for a given situation. In this spirit I believe that long term most of us will end up largely in a virtualized on-prem/off-prem hybrid world. That is one of the many reasons why this partnership is huge, and what brings me back to… what about on-prem?
Essentially take those same core technologies, and deploy them on-prem on our own with a DIY approach perhaps over time like using building blocks, or with a turn key product set like VxRack SDDC from DellEMC (& SHI), externally stretch the network, and go! We now have the exact same virtual infrastructure running on-prem as we do in the private cloud offering in AWS that paints a picture like this:
The benefits of this approach are nothing short of astounding. AWS and other public clouds require vastly different skill sets than those that most of our guys in the data center possess today. There are TONS of ways to go out and get education for those skills, but wouldn’t it be amazing if we could take our existing VMWare skills, tools, and resources that we have invested years and years into and leverage them in our hybrid-cloud environment? Not to mention the over 4500 third party application partners coming along with the VMWare ecosystem. THAT is what we are talking about here! No product, solution, or offering is more important than the people running it or the organization it is powering.
Enabling existing resources to facilitate change in an organization is THE KEY to agility and flexibility in today’s fast paced, technology driven world. Being able to extend a data center on-demand for seasonal upswings or get rid of an existing data center all together and leverage DR in the cloud for seamless workload portability/hybrid operations are only a few of the exciting possibilities.
Extending the SDDC benefits to the cloud could be the first step towards application modernization, test, and development with a single, logical global view and operations. A first step, if you will, to getting to the cloud for the workloads that make sense or that need the multi availability zone and multi region application availability. After all, the cloud is just another tool in the ever expanding toolbox that is infrastructure technology. If resiliency has been built up the stack to the application level with design schemes that leverage loosely coupled application dependencies and queuing systems then we might be cloud ready. If not then we may not be, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t in a spot where our competition may be pulling away, and the elastic nature of the cloud may help us bridge the gap. Combine VMWare tools with those native AWS services mentioned above and VMWonAWS may just be the edge we need to stay in the game!
Now, VMWare wasn’t able to just take their technology, install it on some servers, plug in some cables and walk away. No, no, no… they put a significant amount of effort into this from an engineering perspective, and will continue to do so as time goes on. Running through the finer details regarding the technical changes necessary to make this work is out of my intended scope for this post, but I do want to highlight one in particular which is the change from multicast to unicast networking under the covers in vSAN. This is a hard and fast requirement for networking inside of the public clouds, and really illustrates VMWare’s commitment to this endeavor in my opinion.
VMWare is not going to the big players in the market like AWS and trying to show them how to do things, or have them change to meet VMWare’s requirements. No, VMWare is learning and adapting to the market conditions after taking a cold, hard, and long look in the mirror asking what they need to do in order to best serve their 500,000 plus customers. Then they went and did it, which is HUGE!!!
The sort of agility on display here, as obvious as it may seem, is not easily achieved in a company as large and successful as VMWare. Pat Gelsinger is effectively disrupting his own business in order to make this shift, which is quite a gamble, but also a tremendous showing of strength and leadership. My hat is off to Pat and everyone else involved with bringing this offering to market.
VMWare and AWS customers alike have been asking for this for a while. For many years, VMWare has been nothing short of an obvious choice for most customers on-premises data center virtualization needs, and AWS the same for nearly any public cloud needs. There are a slew of different technologies (the 4500 plus strong mentioned earlier) that have been trying to help us bridge the gap between the two. Trust me when I say that those tools for things like DevOps, Security, and Data Protection aren’t going anywhere, but this partnership between the most trusted infrastructure provider and the world’s largest public cloud/best data center operations company on the planet is a massive step towards us fully realizing the potential of the hybrid cloud future.
We are at an interesting crossroads in the industry with massive consolidation and big time partnerships taking place. DellEMC is in full swing, HPE seems to be buying up a bunch of major players as they try to reinvent themselves (no pun intended), Nutanix is building their own cloud services alongside Google who also just announced a partnership with Cisco. Lastly… Microsoft is landing on-premises with their own unique flavor of convergence and hybridity that is Azure Stack. It seems we are heading down a road where the clouds we choose are defining the infrastructure silos that we thought we were getting away from…
…Hmm, perhaps VMWare has some answers to that as well? 😉 Until next time!
Best,
Russ
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