VMware Cloud on AWS: Is it the best choice for your organization?

In a global survey conducted by Vanson Bourne and VMware, 19% of respondents realize the business value of multicloud, while 70% currently struggle with multicloud complexity. At the same time, 95% of organizations agree that multicloud architectures are now critical to business success.

Flexibility and choice are key for customers when evaluating their transformation strategy. Cost, scalability, application type, migration complexity, internal skill sets, employee bandwidth, and timelines are all important factors influencing the decision to move to the cloud.

VMware Cloud (VMC) is a fully managed hybrid cloud service that integrates their software-defined data center technologies, vSphere, vSAN, and NSX, along with vCenter, to deliver a consistent infrastructure on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, and Microsoft.

Given that VMware produces industry-leading hypervisors, VMware’s multicloud platform – spanning AWS, Google, and Microsoft – is well-positioned to accelerate cloud transformation.

Every managed cloud service has its strengths, so why choose a multicloud strategy with VMware?

Eliminate the burden of infrastructure management and control shadow IT

VMware assumes full responsibility for the provisioning, operation, and maintenance of the entire VMware Cloud stack. This allows VMC to free up IT resources previously dedicated to infrastructure management and expand their technical capabilities with cloud-native technology.

Enable your organization to leverage existing skills, tools, and processes

VMware Cloud allows organizations to extend their existing on-premises vSphere environments to a VMware SDDC running on AWS, Google, or Microsoft. You’ll receive the architecture, capabilities, and operational experience you’re already familiar with across your private and public cloud environments, which can improve productivity and reduce costs.

Accelerate your journey to cloud with AWS, Google, and Microsoft

Without having to purchase custom hardware, rewrite applications, or modify their operating model, you can preserve existing investments while taking advantage of cloud-native capabilities that scale across a global footprint. VMware Cloud adopters can utilize and inherit popular cloud services across areas like security, compute, storage, databases, application services, analytics, and Internet of Things (IoT).

Despite its benefits, VMware Cloud may not be the right fit for everyone.

Expensive entry point and licensing

From its launch, VMware Cloud has always had a steep entry point, and the bulk of the cost comes from the bare-metal servers that the VMware software stack runs on. VMware has made an effort to reduce barriers to entry by introducing more flexible host types and lowering minimum host counts. But most organizations need more than the minimum to support production workloads. Unfortunately, this means that despite the reduced entry thresholds, the overall cost remains prohibitive for some organizations due to the additional solutions and services requirements in their hybrid cloud environments.

Application and OS licensing can also be a challenge for those considering shifting to VMC. Given VMC now spans the big three clouds, there are options, such as bringing your own licensing (BYOL) or buying new, that have eased some of the pain there. A full hybrid cloud assessment is important to ensure the move makes financial sense and any licensing you plan to bring over is compliant with cloud.

Limited ecosystem and integrations

Many third-party integrations rely on access to vSphere APIs that are hosted on-premises in traditional VMware deployments. However, the level of permissions granted to the APIs needed for some third-party integrations may not be as flexible as you would get in a traditional VMware environment. With a fully managed VMware infrastructure, the cloud provider has the authority to limit permissions. This may limit which additional solutions you can use once migrated into VMware, since you’re subject to the cloud provider’s discretion.

Visibility challenges

VMware provides 24×7 support and day one troubleshooting prior to opening a ticket, but this can be challenging when you don’t have the additional management tools to pinpoint problems or perform detailed troubleshooting beforehand.

Without purchasing additional cloud management services, you have limited visibility into the environment from a performance and monitoring perspective.

While there can be challenges in determining whether VMC is right for your organization, it’s important to note that agility, flexibility, and scalability are chief among many drivers for private, hybrid, and public cloud adoption.

Seamlessly migrate your workloads with VMware Cloud

Maintain and expand

VMware Cloud is perfect for private cloud customers that wish to expand to the public cloud for their backup and disaster recovery needs. It’s also a compelling option for clients seeking regional capacity so they can enter new markets.

Consolidate and migrate

VMware Cloud can help businesses reduce their datacenter footprint or get out of their own datacenter entirely. It’s also an attractive landing spot for organizations that want to migrate application workloads that may or may not be cloud ready.

Increase workload flexibility

Organizations that want their private cloud and public cloud to be treated as equal peers should consider VMware Cloud. It can ease bi-directional portability and is excellent for moving development and testing workloads to production or for cyclical capacity.

Ready to accelerate your cloud transformation with VMware Cloud?

VMware Cloud has expanded to a multicloud platform with VMC on AWS, Google Cloud VMware Engine, and Azure VMware solutions, making it a strong option for organizations heavily invested in moving to the public cloud.

If you’re interested in…

• Letting a trusted partner handle infrastructure management
• Freeing up your IT staff to focus on other mission-critical projects
• Reducing costs in a familiar cloud environment
• Leveraging cloud services to shore up your organization’s security, analytics, or IoT initiatives

…let’s have a conversation to see if VMware Cloud is the right path for your organization. Contact your SHI account executive or VMware@SHI.com – or join us at VMware Explore – to learn more about how you can benefit from VMC.