VMware Executives Shares AWS Partnership Details

New details have steadily been pouring in ever since AWS and VMware officially confirmed their blockbuster partnership in 2016, and now we have a comprehensive overview of what the deal entails.

VMware executive Mark Lohmeyer talked at length about this in a lengthy interview, discussing the status of the service, and what customers can expect from it.

The vice president of products for he VMware cloud platform business unit confirmed that VMware Cloud on AWS is still on track for summer 2017 availability, and said that it was the customers that made this partnership with Amazon Web Services a necessity.

That’s because they did not want to make a binary decision of either having a great VMware environment, or taking full advantage of the AWS cloud platform.

This led the company to enable the complete VMware software stack to be delivered as a cloud service on top of AWS elastic bare metal infrastructure — vSphere, vSan and NSX across compute network and storage are all in.

Being bare metal allows the service to be elastic, a very important consideration.

What this means is that customers can ask for additional capacity through an API, and that capacity shows up a few minutes later. It can be paid for on an hourly on-demand basis, or users can only pay for what they actually consume.

And the service is quick to get up and going with. New, first time customers will be able to set up their first host in approximately two hours, and the process of adding or removing additional hosts from there will take around a few minutes.

Lohmeyer also touched upon in detail on the new web console that customers can use to purchase and provision the service, while they are also integrating chat into the service itself.

Meaning customers who are using the service can live chat with a VMware employee to get their questions answer quickly.

When asked about whether AWS is developing software for corporate datacenters with VMware, the senior executive opted not to talk about this partnership. Something is surely cooking!

You can read up on the full interview at the link above, including details on the management capabilities that will be available for user with this VMware and AWS integration.