In today's world where cloud computing is a key strategy for many organizations, having the right deployment is essential. Some organizations implement private clouds within their own local data center, others host their entire infrastructure on the public cloud. However, many organizations have a need to implement a hybrid cloud architecture, combining elements of both the public and private clouds. VMware Cloud on AWS provides a simple and effective method of establishing a hybrid cloud environment.
VMware is a leading vendor when it comes to the virtualization of resources such as compute, storage, and network infrastructure. As a result, many organizations have used or currently utilize VMware within their own data center to manage and optimize their environment, often in their own private clouds.
VMware Cloud on AWS allows you to seamlessly transition your VM workloads to the AWS cloud to take advantage of the benefits that a public cloud can provide such as:
- On-demand resourcing
- Scalability
- Flexibility
- High availability
- Security
- Utility-based metering
- Regional expansion
This integration with AWS also opens up the potential to allow for communication between your VMs and the many services and features that AWS provides. This means your apps and resources in VMware Cloud on AWS can take advantage of AWS object storage such as S3, NoSQL databases such as DynamoDB, EC2 instances, and much more.
The service itself runs on bare-metal architecture allowing the continuation of ESXi hypervisors running the same suite of VMware software and management products as you do on-premises. Both environments can be controlled by VMware vCenter to allow ease of management.
This course takes an introductory look at VMware Cloud on AWS, providing an overview of what it is, how it can benefit your business, its underlying architecture, its integration with AWS and its service, and much more.
Learning Objectives
By the end of this course you will:
- Be able to explain the components of the Software Defined Data Center provided by VMware
- Understand what the VMware Cloud on AWS service is
- Have an understanding on how VMware Cloud on AWS could provide benefits to you and your business
- Have an awareness of how VMware Cloud on AWS connects to your AWS account and how you could provide communication between that and your SDDC
- Understand how maintenance and support is provided across the service
- Be able to explain a range of different use cases that you as a business could utilise the service for
- Understand how much the service is likely to cost
Intended Audience
This course would be of benefit to:
- Business managers looking to understand what VMware Cloud on AWS can provide the enterprise
- VMware and AWS Architects looking to understand how VMware Cloud on AWS works in conjunction with the AWS public cloud and VMware’s private on-premise architecture
- Anyone who wants to gain an introductory understanding of the VMware Cloud on AWS service
Prerequisites
This introductory course does not go into detail about how to configure and implement the VMware Cloud on AWS service, instead it’s designed to provide you with enough information to understand what it is and what it’s used for. However, as a prerequisite to this course, it would be advantageous, but not essential to have a basic understanding of:
- Cloud computing, including deployment models such as public, private, and hybrid clouds (which you can learn about in our What Is Cloud Computing? course)
- Virtualisation principles, such as what a hypervisor is (check out our Introduction to Virtualization Technologies course)
- VMware vSphere products
- AWS Virtual Private Clouds and their configuration (AWS VPCs are covered in detail in our AWS Networking and Content Delivery learning path)
This course includes
9 lectures
Feedback
If you have thoughts or suggestions for this course, please contact Cloud Academy at support@cloudacademy.com.
Hello, and welcome to this short lecture where I'm going to focus on how maintenance and support is covered for the VMware Cloud on AWS Service.
There is quite a difference between the the responsibilities when it comes to the maintenance of VMware services on premises, and VMware Cloud on AWS. This is largely down to how the services is offered. VMware Cloud on AWS I have already mentioned previously, is sold as a service. Which is purchased for VMware directly, not AWS. So if it's sold as a service, what service are you getting from a support and maintenance perspective?
Traditionally with an on premise VMware cluster, you as an organization are responsible for maintaining the physical host that are running the VMs, The physical storage disk, and the network infrastructure. If any part of this physical infrastructure fails, then you are responsible for fixing and replacing that hardware. It's not just about hardware failures though. If your hardware or software needs upgrading, such as additional storage capacity or memory, or you vCenter Server needs a software patch, then again you'll have to perform this maintenance.
With VMware Cloud on AWS, The responsibility of all this maintenance is transferred to VMware. As a part of the service offering, VMware will monitor and maintain the underlying physical host within your cluster, within your SDDC. The service works in conjunction with vSphere High Availability to help reduce outages as and when they occur.
If a fault is detected on an underlying host, then the VMs are automatically restarted on a different host within the same cluster. Depending on the fault, the host is either restarted or replaced if there is a hardware fault. And all of this is performed as a part of the VMware Cloud on AWS service, supplied by VMware.
Now from a software perspective, there is always a matter of patching and software updates to perform to the VMware vSphere suite of products. Again, for any services running in the SDDC, VMware are responsible for all patching and updates to all VMware software. For example, any patching required for hypervisors, etc.
This saves you having to worry about compatibility issues across your environment, or having to resource in the time to deploy and test the updates. Again, this is all a part of the service offered by VMware, it is down to VMware to resolve. During the patching of hosts, VMware uses vMotion to ensure there is zero down-time, so patching can happen transparently.
VMware also manages patching of the management software too, such as vCenter Server. For certain patching and updates, customers can expect some minor outage and unavailability. But this will be within a specified maintenance window. However, this will not affect any availability of your VMs of workloads. Your compute, storage and network services will continue to operate within the SDDC.
So with this in mind, it's clear to see that VMware are responsible for the actual SDDC software, and the underlying physical components of the SDDC architecture. This simply leaves you as the customer to focus on your applications, your VMs, and the workloads that you intend to carry out. No more lifecycle management of infrastructure and software to deal with.
From a support perspective, if you have any issues or problems with the service itself, then as a customer, VMware remains the contact point. Even though the underlying architecture is running on AWS supplied hardware. Should an incident or fault occur that requires iMediation of AWS owned hardware, VMware will coordinate with AWS on your behalf.
From a support perspective, the VMware Cloud on AWS service itself has a level of administrative rights across your SDDC. This allows for the service to be monitored and managed by VMware, as they will resolve underlying host issues, and perform patching on your behalf, along with provisioning additional hosts for cluster scaling. As a result, this level of administrative privileges is required.
That now brings me to the end of this lecture. Coming up next, I'll be covering some of the different use cases that VMware Cloud on AWS could be used for.
Stuart has been working within the IT industry for two decades covering a huge range of topic areas and technologies, from data center and network infrastructure design, to cloud architecture and implementation.
To date, Stuart has created 150+ courses relating to Cloud reaching over 180,000 students, mostly within the AWS category and with a heavy focus on security and compliance.
Stuart is a member of the AWS Community Builders Program for his contributions towards AWS.
He is AWS certified and accredited in addition to being a published author covering topics across the AWS landscape.
In January 2016 Stuart was awarded ‘Expert of the Year Award 2015’ from Experts Exchange for his knowledge share within cloud services to the community.
Stuart enjoys writing about cloud technologies and you will find many of his articles within our blog pages.