VMware & AWS Add Cloud Migration And Disaster Recovery Tools

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and VMware are adding a number of new services to make it easier for customers to move their virtual applications to Amazon’s cloud infrastructure.

The two firms had been fierce rivals but surprised the world of IT last year with the announcement of their partnership, which hopes to attract businesses running on-premise virtualisation but keen to harness the advantages of the public cloud.

Essentially, through the partnership VMware extends the scope in how its software is deployed and prevents locking-in its customers to using one cloud platform or choosing between on-premise or cloud deployments.

VMware AWS

For its part, Amazon gets access to VMware’s significant enterprise customer base and thus help them compete in what has become a very competitive market between some of the largest technology companies in the world.

VMware Cloud on AWS has been live since August but were only available on one AWS region – US East (Virginia). This has now been extended to US West (Oregon) in a bid to improve availability.

Faster app migration is promised with the introduction of vSphere Motion and AWS Direct Connect, while VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension will allow for large scale migration.

Finally, VMware Site Recovery promises to improve security by offering protection between customer data centres and VMware Cloud on AWS or between VMware environments in different availability zones.

“The momentum for VMware Cloud on AWS is growing rapidly, and VMware and AWS are delivering major new capabilities after only three months of availability while enhancing our strategic relationship with new integrations across our platforms,” said Mark Lohmeyer, head of VMware’s Cloud Platform Business Unit.

“Customers of VMware Cloud on AWS will be able to migrate application portfolios to the cloud even more rapidly with Hybrid Cloud Extension and AWS Direct Connect, while maintaining the optimal levels of performance, scale, and availability required for mission-critical apps.”

Last week Microsoft said VMware workloads would be able to run on Azure public cloud infrastructure through unnamed VMware-certified partners. However VMware responded with a warning that it will not support any such migrations, and that it does not “believe this approach will offer customers a good solution to their hybrid or multi-cloud future.”

Think you know all about Amazon Web Services? Try our quiz!