VMC on AWS Outposts was announced a few years back to offer customers the benefits of VMC on AWS but on-premises. (For those who don’t about VMC on AWS Outposts, please check my older article here.)
Then in 2019 at re:Invent, VMware and AWS revealed the launch of a beta program in which some lucky customers were able to participate.
After a long wait and some delays, VMware finally announced at VMworld 2021 the launch of VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts. The service is only available in the US at the moment
VMware Cloud on AWS has been around for a couple of years now and has improved over time by providing new services and expanding regularly to more regions across the world.
VMware’s cloud solutions is now getting better and we’ll go through some of the new features and capabilities announced at VMWorld 2020 that will be available soon.
Recap
Before going any further and see what’s waiting for with on VMC on AWS, let’s quickly review the different use cases of that solution.
Hello the VMware community. VMware has released yesterday a small but important update to vRA 8.
So what’s new?
Well, in the very first release of vRA 8, it wasn’t possible yet to migrate from vRA 7.x , due to the major changes in the architecture. it was just a matter of time before VMware brings up the functionality.
But from now on, you can migrate your existing vRA 7.5 or 7.6 environnent to 8.0.1. VMware also says that a migration is possible by creating a brand new vRA 8 platform and then migrate all the configuration from an existing vRA 7.x environment.
I can imagine that a lot of people was waiting for this feature which is quite important and especially when it comes to a major release of a product. So guys let’s go to our homelabs or test environment and do some migrations.
VMware also developed a new migration assessment tool to collect “offline” data from your vRA, vRO or external vRO source environment. Then you can upload the collected data during the assessment phase of your new installation.
The new features below are part of vRA 8.0.1 as well:
Git Integrations
Blueprint Properties Editor
API enhancements for Networking and Deployments
Extensibility VA and ABX resiliency enhancements
vRO based catalog services now support array/number as inputs parameters
Last week at AWS re:Invent, AWS and VMware made an interesting announcement. The launch of the beta program of VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts.
Some lucky customers will be able to participate to the beta program before a general availability somewhere in 2020.
So what was VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts about again?
If you remember, VMware and AWS unveiled last year a new offering: “VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts”, to allow customers to take benefit of VMware Cloud on AWS, but on premise into their data center.
vRealize Automation 8 was released last week and I wanted to share with you how to do the installation of that new version.
Like I stated in a previous blog post, vRA 8 comes in a brand new platform built on a container-based architecture running on Photon OS 2.0.
As you know, no more Windows machines is required but the vRA 8 appliance includes all the services such as Cloud Assembly, Service Broker, Code Stream, and vRealize Orchestrator that leverage the main product.
There are some prerequisites before installing vRA 8. You will have first to deploy the Lifecycle Manager and then the Identity Manager. Know that you can also migrate earlier version of LCM and IDM if you have older version running in your environment. However it is not possible to install each component by deploying their respective OVA files.
It’s official! VMware and Google Cloud team up to deliver a new Cloud platform to customers.
This new partnership will allow VMware to extend once more its muti-cloud portfolio and run VMware Cloud Fondation into Google Cloud.
So what’s up with that new offering?
Google will leverage on their platform the full VMware stack that include of course vSphere, but also vSAN and NSX-T, and Google Cloud will be in charge of the support. It is worth to mention that this solution is developped by CloudSimple, the same company that brought us VMware on Microsoft Azure.
The new solution will be available in late 2019, no region has been mentioned yet for the launch but my guess is it will be the US as usual.
This is becoming really interesting because if you remember well, VMware first teamed up in 2017 with AWS to reveal the WMware Cloud on AWS offering, then was announced a partnership with IBM and more recently at the last DellTechnology World was revealed the VMware Cloud on Microsoft Azure solution.
Now VMware’s customers have again the opportunity to expand their on premise infrastructure to a hybride cloud with the provider of their choice and take benefit of their public cloud services.
Now the question is, which one will be the best fit for you and your workloads ? 2020 is gonna be for VMware a year full of multi-cloud awesomeness!
At DellTechnologies World, some good announcements have been made including also new partnerships that we’ll talk about in another post. But before going further, it is important to remind you guys what happened last year at VMworld.
The project Dimension was revealed, which is a new way to deliver the SDDC on hardware as-a-service to customer’s on-premises. It can be implemented on either your datacenters or on an edge location.
So basically, you can have hardware as-a-service on-prem where you can then implement your SDDC stack and never care about hardware maintenance, upgrade, patching etc.. because VMware does it for you. This is a brand new concept which I think is the best combination for Hybrid Cloud to also get rid of CAPEX.
