VMware and Cloud do not normally seem synonymous or, in fact, near each other. VMware is still viewed as the on-premises solution that is used for hypervisors, and then the cloud is viewed as a regional solution in multiple locations. VMC on AWS has changed that landscape, and the landscape continues to be changed. Dell came into the market with its “Dell Cloud”, and VMware’s parent company continues to improve its offering. You are still purchasing a rack of Dell hardware but now that rack has been optimized with the SDDC to allow more nodes and better utilization.

This all comes into effect making the Dell cloud a better solution for companies looking for a co-location data center or a hybrid solution for cloud. With the addition of more optimization you can also deploy multiple clusters on the same rack of resources. Up to 8 clusters on one rack will let you manage your clusters within a single-pane of glass, and yet segment the clusters. These are all amazing updates to Dells Cloud, but then one function needed is HCX into Dell, which is announced today. Allowing HCX to migrate your workloads from your legacy infrastructure to your Dell cluster lets customers do a cold, hot, or warm migration from on-premises to your Dell cloud and provides continuity for an application in 2 location. More to come on this.

VMC on AWS

With the optimization coming to the original hybrid cloud there are some great updates. First starting with allowing vCenter linking to work between vCenter to vCenter.

This creates a better view of the environment from a single pane of glass at a vCenter level. Next there are additional migration and replication using HCX. The ability to create groups of workloads to migrate from one location to the other really helps create borders around the applications to ensure the full workload and dependencies are migrated together.

The real interesting story here is seeing everything at a vCenter level, as well as being able to migrate your workloads from on-premises to off. Now with all this addition to migrations and management of your full environment, what would be next?

DRaaS – Disaster Recovery as a Service

So you may have heard that VMware purchased Datrium a while ago, the question is, what would they use Datrium for? Perhaps the best thing Datrium was used for before they were with VMware, but with VMC on AWS. That’s what we’re seeing today. Disaster recovery as a service allows you to backup your solution and manage it depending on the type of backup you want to use. If your looking at a hot backup, your change rate is kept pretty close to live, so that you can immediately bring up your infrastructure in another location. This is where the migration to and management of VMC’s comes into play, now with the updates in both hybrid cloud solutions. Here is a shot of the solution:

This will leverage Datrium’s solution into a very useful DR solution that already was a stellar selling point for VMC on AWS, now with Dell cloud as well.

With these new solutions coming to customers, moving to a hybrid cloud is getting easier. With the addition of optimization for Dell cloud the cost of the rack is more justified. Finally with the Datrium acquisition, creating a DR/BCP looks far simpler to create, and execute.