VMware on Amazon Web Services (AWS)
In 2016 VMware and AWS came together to jointly engineer a Cloud solution that allows you to run your VMware workloads on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud platform. Once you’ve migrated to AWS Cloud you can then leverage numerous AWS Cloud services such as managed Relational Databases, serverless computing, S3 storage, EC2 instances and much more. You can also continue to use some of your on-premise applications should you not wish to migrate everything to AWS Cloud.
Architecture
The VMware on AWS Cloud infrastructure consists of your private cloud which is your on-premises data center and a Software Defined Data Centre (SDDC) on AWS which in turn can connect to and leverage AWS services in the Cloud. The SDDC consists of vSphere for compute, vSAN for storage and NSX-T for networking. The SDDC environment is spun up in the cloud on AWS infrastructure.
What’s great about the whole setup is that, the SDDC is running on bare metal hardware, so no nested virtualization. It means you benefit from improved performance, enhanced security, low latency and increased speed. Its fully operated and managed by VMware, as a result you have limited access the underlying infrastructure. No root access for example. All upgrades and patches are done by VMware.
In configuring the SDDC you will have two clusters, one for Management and for your Production workloads. The management workloads will be on the management datastore pool and the Production workloads will be on the Production datastore pool. This makes management easier as you can patch and upgrade the management cluster without impacting the Production cluster. You can also, opt to have IO optimized hardware for your Production cluster if there are resource intensive workloads in your environment.
A distributed firewall is included at no extra cost and is used to manage east — west traffic within the AWS SDDC. There is a firewall for each VM within the SDDC and you can implement micro segmentation. Micro segmentation enables the data center to be divided into logical security segments down to the individual workloads.
Why would you want to use VMware vSphere in the Cloud?
There are a number of reasons why an organisation would want to move their workloads to the cloud and more importantly continue to use VMware vSphere. Continuing to use vSphere means staff will carry on using tools they already know how to use and be able to access other cloud services for transformation and agile delivery with the ability to bring products to market faster. VMware on AWS has four primary use cases:
Data Center Expansion
There may be a need for your organisation to extend its services due to a sudden increase in demand for example. Moving to the Cloud allows you to expand rapidly as you can spin up services quickly and start consuming on-demand cloud services. Your test and dev environment could be moved to the Cloud, the advantage here is that you can turn off services when you are not consuming them. Virtual desktop is another good use case for the Cloud. You only pay for what you use.
Cloud Migrations
If you have already decided to move your workloads to the cloud or want to leverage some other cloud services such as EC2, S3 and R53 for instance then you will need to migrate them. So, it could be as a result of an infrastructure refresh or a data center wide migration due to you moving out of the data center. It could also be application specific that you want to migrate so as to take advantage of better performance and reduced latency.
Disaster Recovery
You may want to move your workloads for disaster recovery reasons. If you are only in the one data center or are a growing start up and no longer want to rely on just offsite backups for instance. Renting space in a co-location data center might not be an option since you have to invest in new hardware, such as; servers, storage and switches. Then they need to be installed and configured which could take months. Setting up a data center in the cloud might be a quick and more cost-effective solution. With VMware SDDC it can be setup in as little as 2 hours, with a minimum of 2 hosts. VMware will also let you set up one host for a maximum of 30 days. Then you can scale out your cluster from there.
Modernization
By implementing VMware on AWS organisations can take advantage of modern applications such as Kubernetes and Containers. vSphere 7 now comes with Kubenetes thus allowing organisations to innovate faster. This would also integrate well with AWS containerized services such as; Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). These services provide a secure and reliable way to run containerized applications.
Migrating to Amazon Web Services
Once you have decided to move your workloads to the cloud, created an AWS account, installed and configured your SDDC you will need to migrate those workloads. VMware provides a tool, free of charge to enable migration. VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) is used to migrate your on-premises virtual machines (VMs) and applications to VMware Cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The migration uses VMware enterprise-class software-defined data center (SDDC) software on the AWS Cloud to provide optimized access to AWS services.
Migration Planning and Considerations
Planning your migration is essential and you will want to take a number of things into consideration before you start the migration. You need to think about your application workloads such as performance, latency and throughput required. Workload type, random or sequential. Is it suitable for the cloud? You will also want to think about storage. What are the storage requirements to run the workload on? For single domain designs, vSAN is the primary storage used. However, in a workload domain you may want to provision IO optimized hardware for your storage within the VMware SDDC.
VMware Hybrid Extension (HCX)
VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) is one of the tools you can use to migrate the Virtual Machines from On-Prem to the SDDC. The layer 2 network is stretched to the SDDC thus allowing VMs to be migrated across to the target SDDC. You are able to migrate 1000’s of VMs using vSphere with vMotion Replication. This initially seeds the data to the SDDC then does a cut over once the its completed seeding. The cool thing here is that there is a recycle bin where migrated VMs are stored. Should you wish to roll back or revert back, all you need to do is power off the VM in the cloud and power on the source VM.
VMware on AWS has been gaining a lot of attention since its inception in 2016. It’s definitely the way to go if you want to extend your data center due to lack of capacity, disaster recovery or you want to leverage modern applications like Kubernetes or Containers. One of the great things about VMware on AWS is that its fully managed and your employees will continue to work with VMware tools they are already familiar with.
Cost needs to be factored in when considering deploying VMware on AWS. New hardware costs, support and maintenance costs, time to scale-up when required should all be considered. VMware have a range of flexible cost options which would make an interesting read. See here.
