Top 5 Challenges that VMware Cloud on AWS Solves for Enterprises
As VMware’s vSphere platform still powers over 75% of all virtual instances globally, who could be better positioned to help enterprises solve many of the toughest challenges enterprises face today? In this post, we’ll dig into the five most pronounced challenges that we’ve been hearing for years as a VMware Cloud Service Provider and discuss the solutions VMware Cloud on AWS brings to the table.
The driving force(s) for cloud adoption varies widely by organization. Whether it’s the perceived financial benefits, a pending office relocation, increased agility, reduced latency to AWS or the appeal to get out the business of managing hardware and datacenters. Sometimes the benefits of cloud don’t outweigh the familiarity and ease of integration of on-premises. VMware saw the integration, consistency, and complexity challenges in the market and partnered with AWS to give enterprises the best that both organizations have to offer. Which is the vast service portfolio at AWS and the core VMware platform that has been powering critical workloads for nearly two decades.
With over 50,000,000 VMware based virtual machines globally, and over 75,000+ trained VMware Certified Professionals in North America alone, VMware Cloud on AWS is designed to help these professionals:
- escape the burden of capital intensive hardware procurements & management
- retain the expertise around VMware
- provide vCenter access in the cloud
- avoid re-writing applications
- integrate existing 3rd party tools
- perform a simple lift and shift or lift and extend migration
Faction was one of three Service Providers tapped by VMware to join the early evaluation program to help design consulting services, professional services, and managed services to assist customers with their digital transformation process and ensuring customers are fully supported and have expertise on-hand once they are on-boarded to VMware Cloud on AWS.
The deeper we’ve dug into this service, the more we’ve validated these five challenges.
1) Getting Hybrid Cloud Right
Challenge for Enterprises:
- 77% of cloud consumers are struggling to find & deploy cloud services that are the right fit for their workloads and organizational requirements
- Integrating their tools, operations, and policies between clouds
- Difficult to achieve low latency service between clouds
- Feeling pressure to move to the cloud, but current options require either re-platforming or re-writing applications
- Feeling hamstrung by physical devices
How VMware Cloud on AWS & Faction Solves for this:
- Leverage the public cloud where it makes sense while also leveraging internal expertise on the VMware platform
- Avoid re-writing and re-platforming applications and keep VMware for core and critical apps
- Integrate physical devices into a Public Cloud environment using Faction’s Cross Cloud Colocation with Direct Connect Service to both your AWS VPC and VMware Cloud on AWS environment
2) Datacenter Consolidation
Challenge for Enterprises:
- Many enterprises have moved line of business applications off to SaaS models but haven’t left the datacenter footprint behind
- Datacenters have sprawled due to acquisitions over time or having multiple separate office locations
- Keeping applications and systems up to date, Nsync (#JTfan4life), and within policy has become a daunting task and has created a compatibility matrix from hell
How VMware Cloud on AWS & Faction Solves for this:
- Keep VMware at the core and reduce the number of facilities or move away from managing datacenters and hardware altogether
- Migrate line of business applications and distribute across multiple VMware Cloud on AWS regions without managing datacenters
3) Addressing planned and unplanned capacity bursts
Challenge for Enterprises:
- Difficult to address seasonal spikes and burst of requirements in on-premises datacenters
- Struggle to provide agility to the business
- Pay by the resources we consume
How VMware Cloud on AWS & Faction Solves for this:
- Stop paying by the instance – spin up as many VMs as you need within your cluster for test /development, short term projects, or other burting scenarios
- Add or remove hosts to a cluster for cyclical capacity
4) Getting out of the Hardware Business
Challenge for Enterprises:
- Lots of folks would love to be done with the datacenter, but they can’t find a cloud solution that fits their requirements
- Lack of expertise, time or resources to find and migrate to a cloud provider
- Lack of control in current cloud options
How VMware Cloud on AWS & Faction Solves for this:
- Faction has a team of engineers, architects, and security professionals that help customers build, migrate and manage cloud environments
- Leverage VMwares familiar toolset and framework in the cloud, while having access to over 80+ native services offered by AWS
5) Disaster Recovery
Challenge for Enterprises:
- Looking to move away from managing and supporting secondary datacenters for Disaster Recovery, but having difficulty finding a provider that allows vCenter access for tools like SRM, Zerto, and Veeam
- The last thing folks want is to have to learn or remember a new UI during a DR event
- There are a few legacy physical devices that virtual machines rely on, like an AS400 system and a physical database
How VMware Cloud on AWS & Faction Solves for this:
- Integrate physical devices into a Public Cloud environment using Faction’s Cross Cloud Colocation with Direct Connect Service to both your AWS VPC and VMware Cloud on AWS environment
- Maintain operational consistency and have VMware vCenter in both your on-premises production environment and your DR environment within VMware Cloud on AWS
An additional challenge some organizations could face is that VMware Cloud on AWS requires a minimum of 4 hosts, but the true minimum number of hosts will be driven by the amount of storage that is required to hold your VMs (each host provides ~5.25TB usable).
If you don’t meet the minimum, Faction has additional options for customers to overcome this barrier. Which is great news for those who see this minimum cluster configuration requirement as a roadblock for using VMware Cloud on AWS, but still want to solve these top 5 challenges for their organization.