Last week saw the launch of VMC on AWS in South Africa. There were two events which took place. The first one was in Johannesburg on 14 Feb 2023. The second was on 16 Feb 2023 and took place in Cape Town. Customers and partners had a chance to gain a more detailed understanding of VMC on AWS, to experience some of the capabilities and to see some demos.
Although the service did go live in Nov 2022, the launch was an opportunity for customers and partners to get together with experts from both VMware and AWS. The best thing about having the experts around was the chance for the attendees to ask the questions that had been on their minds. (One of the questions that I recall was related to egress charges)
Personally, what excited me the most was that it was a chance to celebrate the availability of the service on the African continent.
Why should a customer use VMC on AWS?
Here are some reasons that come to mind:
1) Location: Apart from the service being on the African continent and living in the beautiful city of Cape Town, customers don’t need to access VMC on AWS in the European regions. This of course reduces the latency when connecting to Europe from South Africa.
2) Data Residency: For South African customers who are required to have their data within the borders of South Africa.
3) Same look and feel: VMC on AWS comprises the same Software Defined Data Centre (SDDC) components which make up existing on-premises SDDC’s; those being vSphere, vSAN and NSX. This means that an admin can leverage their existing skills and daily processes to manage and operate their cloud offering.
4) New use cases: VMC on AWS gives customers an easy way to on-board additional services such as disaster recovery utilizing VCDR.
5) Access to native AWS services: When using VMC on AWS, customers can make use of any of the native AWS services (s3, load balancers and so on).
Sounds great, but how do I get my data into VMC on AWS?
This is where HCX comes to the fore. HCX extends a customers’ on premises network into their cloud SDDC. Once done, a VM can be migrated to the extended segment in the SDDC. During the demo, the team VMotion’ed a running VM from a data center in Dubai to their SDDC in VMC on AWS in Cape Town (I expected the audience to celebrate a little more than they did. In fairness, the majority of the people in attendance see vMotion do it’s magic on a daily basis, so it’s cool).
HCX also implements various migration types, depending on a customers requirement:
- HCX Bulk Migration – Minimal downtime during a switchover, 100 concurrent migrations
- HCX vMotion – No Downtime, migrate single vm
- HCX Cold Migration- Downtime, the vm is migrated while in a powered off state
- HCX Replication Assisted vMotion – No Downtime, bulk migration
Disaster Recovery
Now that we’ve covered getting the VM’s into our SDDC in the cloud, allow me to further explain the additional DR use case I mentioned above.
VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery (VCDR) provides a SaaS disaster recovery solution for either an on-premises data center or the SDDC in VMC on AWS and a customer pays for what they use.
VCDR creates replicas every few hours througout the day. These are then encrypted and stored in the cloud. If a disaster was to occur (think data center flooding, ransomware and so on) a customer clicks a button and fails over to the cloud. VCDR provisions a new SDDC on VMC on AWS and restores the VM.
Fail back is just as simple. Deduplicated data is compressed and sent back to the production SDDC.
I hope that you give VMC on AWS a try, from where ever it is in the world you are.
Here some additional resources
Have a look at the links below if you need to get more information about what I’ve written about above.
VMC on AWS:
https://vmc.techzone.vmware.com/vmware-cloud-aws
https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/docs/vmw-vmc-on-aws-uslet-web-final.pdf
HCX:
https://vmc.techzone.vmware.com/vmc-solutions/docs/intro/introduction-to-hcx
VCDR:
https://core.vmware.com/resource/vmware-cloud-dr-ransomware-recovery-guide
https://blogs.vmware.com/virtualblocks/2021/09/28/operational-air-gaps/
VCP-VMC Certification:
Have a look here for free training on VMware Cloud
https://www.virtually-random.co.za/vcp-cloud-2022/
Thank you for staying until the end 🙂