As some of you may or may not have seen, VMware has announced a partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS). If you didn’t see the press release you can find it here. More details are emerging related to the actual technical capabilities of this solution. They are really shaping up to be something pretty great.

Why is VMware doing this?

Obviously AWS is the leading provider of public cloud. I don’t think it’s any secret that VMware is looking to take advantage of that fact. Being the leader in the private cloud space, partnering with the leader in public cloud actually makes a lot of sense. Of course you have to question what will happen to vCloud Air if this partnership takes off. They are stacking the VMware virtualization offerings on top of AWS.

What are the capabilities?

VMware has since published a blog about some of the features and there are some really great capabilities here. See the blog here.

I pulled out, what I thought were, the most interesting ones

·       Operated and supported by VMware: The service will be operated, sold and supported by VMware. All software components of the service will be fully certified and supported by VMware.

·       Seamless integration with AWS Services: Virtual Machines running in this environment will have access to leverage AWS’s broad set of cloud-based services including storage, database, analytics and more. This will enable a new set of solutions only possible with VMware environments co-existing on the same infrastructure as AWS cloud-based services.

·       Seamless workload portability: Full VM compatibility and total workload portability between the datacenter and the AWS cloud.  No complex and time consuming application re-platforming is required.  Whether you want to use the cloud as your disaster recovery site, migrate a whole data center, or simply burst to the cloud – you can be confident that your applications will just work.

This appears to be the best of both worlds. If you are committed to using VMware for your private cloud and you are adopting a hypbrid cloud solution, you’ll have the capabilities of VMware but the elastic and on demand features of AWS. Features like NSX and vRA may be available options here too. In my opionion this is a good move for VMware and AWS. VMware is owning the sales and support of this environment so be sure to work with your partner on getting connected to this.