Supercharging VMware Cloud on AWS

00:00:04 Stuart Robinson

Hello and welcome to Cloud insiders; the podcast that brings cloud down to Earth, brought to you by extrovert. Today we are revisiting the exciting world of VMware Cloud on AWS, but this time we’re coming at it from the Amazon Web services point of view. To help us navigate this side of things, we’re joined by Chris Porter, Specialist Solutions Architect over at Amazon Web Services. Hi there, Chris.

00:00:25 Chris Porter

Hi Stuart, thanks for having me on.

00:00:27 Stuart Robinson

No thank you very much for coming on. Also joining us we have Xtravirt and third time cloud insiders, expert guest Andy Hine, hello there, Mr Hine.

00:00:35 Andy Hine

Hello Stu, thanks for having me back.

00:00:37 Stuart Robinson

Always welcome, Sir. You’re always welcome. So, if we start off with Chris, how did you find yourself working as a VMWare specialist Solutions Architect over AWS?

00:00:48 Chris Porter

Yeah, so I’m a Specialist solution architect at AWS, and I specialize in VMware technology, so that’s primarily VMWare cloud on AWS. I’ve been here at AWS just over 7 months and prior to that I was working at a bank in central London where I looked after the VMware infrastructure there and also I deployed their AWS estate. When this role kind of came up, it looked like a great combination of two technologies I’m passionate about, so I jumped at the chance of taking it up. Yeah, and so it’s been a really interesting time learning the AWS side of things. I’m also applying that to VMware technologies that I’ve used probably the best part of the last decade. Alongside that I was working on a project just before I left my previous employer and I used that project to build our VCDX design, which I successfully passed in June of last year after 18 months of work. So, I’m VCX number 281.

00:01:42 Stuart Robinson

It’s always good to have a VCDX on the line. And Andy it’s great to have you back on. We don’t get to have you on here half as much as we’d like. For anyone unfamiliar. Could you tell us briefly about yourself and what you do at Xtravirt?

00:01:54 Andy Hine

Sure, thanks Stuart, so yeah, my name is Andy Hine, I’m a technical presales consultant here Xtravirt. It’s a role that I’ve enjoyed for coming up to five years now. So, I get to work with our customers day-to-day scoping out their live projects, which is a really cool and varied role. I’m also Xtravirt’s lead technical pre-sales touchpoint between our business and VMware across all of their products really, but particularly on new and emerging technology. Which has led to a lot of recent interest and a lot of focus around VMware Cloud on AWS.

00:02:28 Stuart Robinson

Beautiful and Chris, we’ve not actually had someone specifically from AWS on the podcast before. I can’t imagine there’s many people out there that are unfamiliar with what AWS do, but could you just give us a quick, in a nutshell rundown of what AWS offers and how someone could get started on their services.

00:02:45 Chris Porter

Yeah, sure, so here are AWS we offer Cloud computing services and we’ve been doing that since 2006. We provide those services from 22 regions and 216 points of presence across the globe, and we’ve announced plans for 5 new regions. We have millions of active customers every month and we operate a huge scale because of that. So, there’s lots of stats I could select, but one of my favourites is talking about our object storage system, which is S3 and that to date holds trillions of objects and we regularly see that peak at millions of requests per second. The Amazon S3 is one of the 175 services that we provide across compute databases, analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, IoT, mobile hybrid, VR Media application development, and there’s probably six other sectors that I haven’t mentioned that we also have a depth and breadth of services for. To get started with any of those services,it’s super simple, you just need to head over to aws.amazon.com and click the big button that says create an address account and you’re up and running within minutes.

00:03:51 Stuart Robinson

That’s brilliant. And, of course, you mentioned there VMware cloud on AWS. If you would be so kind, can you just give us a quick rundown on what that is and what AWS services that entails?

00:04:02 Chris Porter

Yeah, so VMware Cloud on AWS we see is the fastest, simplest and lowest risk method of moving your VMware workloads to the AWS Cloud. It’s a jointly developed solution between VMWare and AWS, and it’s been available since August 2017. It’s delivered and supported by VMware and built upon and deeply integrated into some of the AWS technologies that I was just talking about those 175 services. It’s not integrated into all of those, but it is deeply integrated to some of our core platforms such as EC2, which is our compute platform and our networking platform, VPC, amongst others. It can be purchased from VMware, AWS and from our partners. Digging a little bit deeper, it’s made up of VMware software defined data center core components, so their SVC, which is the vCenter ESXI, vSan and NSX, and because we’re running those VMware technologies that you could run on your own data centre on top of the AWS Cloud, what we see is VMware administrators have a very familiar service that they can leverage compared to what they’re already running on prem, which is outlined by a couple of really interesting kind of capabilities. One of those is hybrid link mode, so you can, that allows you to see both your on premises vCenter alongside the VMware Cloud vCenter, so you can manage them through the same interface and then also you can actually do things like Vmotion things from on Prem into VMware Cloud on AWS, so it’s seamlessly, without having to re-IP and no downtime for that VM, that’s absolutely an option that we see customers leverage if they do want to avoid downtime for the things are migrating and or VMs they are migrating.  So, kind of in summary, you get the best combination of VMware’s Frontline technologies and combined with the security, reliability, elasticity and regional capabilities of the AWS Cloud.

00:05:51 Stuart Robinson

Brilliant and there are now many, many organisations enjoying benefits as a result of moving to VMware Cloud on AWS. Andy how are you seeing people in the real-world use VMware Cloud on AWS.

00:06:04 Andy Hine

Yeah, most definitely. So, we see kind of the typical use cases for VMware Cloud on AWS, such as data center evacuation and cloud migration as well as data center extension. So that’s what Chris touched upon, so customers who are familiar with VMware technology like vSphere and vCenter and that kind of thing, which is a large part of the IT community and they feel very comfortable that they’re going to be using familiar and tried and tested VMware technology in their cloud. We’ve got various customer success stories to share with you, the first of which was for a software development company and they really incorporated all three of those use cases by building out a global infrastructure blueprint. They created a real hybrid cloud. By combining brand new on premise VMware SDDC clusters with new VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC clusters by region.

So, they had a US, EMEA and an Asia Pacific region and that was a billion dollar company and they’ve got a desire to grow by three-fold in the next few years by quite an aggressive merger and acquisition program. So they need a consistent and scalable platform to accommodate that growth. First and foremost, as well as providing a local migration target for their existing infrastructure, which was dispersed over you know some 70 plus global locations.

So, they’re achieving what they want to achieve with VMware cloud on AWS, and I believe that is still the largest purchase to date of the product from out of EMEA. What that also brought to our attention was another use case for VMware Cloud on AWS, and that’s actually been a prime driver, a prime use case for another customer that we that we, and that was around end user compute. This customer is a retail customer, they’re looking to host desktops in the cloud, because VMware Cloud on AWS as we’ve spoken about is built on that vSphere and vCentre NSX platform it’s lent itself really, really well to be a good candidate for hosting VMware Horizon. So that kind of suite of digital workspace technology that some may remember as VMware View as a starting point for that, and the reason that it’s a great candidate for that is it gives pretty much full feature parity to an on-premises version of Horizon 7 which is the latest iteration of that technology. But you just don’t have the management overhead of managing your own private software defined data center and what that entails. So this customer is about to embark on standing up about 2000 Horizon based desktops in VMware cloud on AWS. And because of the nature of their business, they need elastic scale throughout busy periods, so they’ve got a peak trading period between October and January. So, Black Friday and on Christmas and New year, etc. And how VMware Cloud on AWS is helping that is, it’s got an auto scale feature, so it allows for hosts to be automatically added during the busy periods. So, I think it’s a 75 to 80% utilization another host is spun up, and then you can spin that host back down again when that busy period is over.

So that’s how they’re using the kind of the core use cases for VMware Cloud on AWS. In the context of some of the AWS native services, it’s worth mentioning that the VMware Cloud on AWS has a high-speed link into Amazon’s native services, that that kind of wealth of 175 services that that Chris mentioned, or certainly a large subsection of those, and that’s something called an elastic network interface and subject to design it could be free of ingress and egress charges, which is a massive benefit because it allows that close proximity access to the native AWS services. It’s not only complementing your existing VMware Cloud on AWS solution, but it also allows your business to move more towards an application modernization program such as re-platforming or re-factoring your applications to be cloud native.

Just some of the native services that we’ve touched on in those examples, we were using things like Amazon S3 storage buckets to, as a target for our VM backups, we were using Amazon Route 53 for load balancing, which is particularly useful as a requirement for horizon and also Amazon Direct Connect, which is that kind of enterprise grade networking connectivity into the into the Amazon Web services platform.

Those of you who are interested I’ve just completed a blog about some of those topics and that should be available on our websites on Xtravirt.com very shortly, just under our resources section.

00:10:26 Stuart Robinson

Cool, and are you seeing any particular interest in VMware Cloud on AWS from any particular industry sectors and did you see any early adopters?

00:10:35 Andy Hine

So, there seems to be no limitation on industry sector, so it seems to be pretty industry wide at the moment, so that the first example that I mentioned were a publicly listed software development company, the second example of privately owned retail business. And I was I was going to call a customer in the past couple of days in the finance sector and we’ve also had conversations with customers, educational customers and charities as well. So, it’s not really limited to an industry for from what we’re seeing. Having said that, the first responders are really technology front runners, so those that keep in touch with the kind of the leading edge, technology and technology announcements and things like that. And also existing Amazon Web Services customers. They’ve gotten an additional route to market through their existing subscriptions and also are already familiar with Amazon as well, so they seem to be a good candidate for early adopters as well.

00:11:27 Stuart Robinson

Cool and this is possibly a good place to reference the fact that of course we’re in the middle of the COVID-19 health crisis and there’s loads and loads of people working from home. Have you seen a lot more additional uptake for disaster recovery and business continuity capabilities within VMware Cloud on AWS?

00:11:45 Andy Hine

Yeah, absolutely, so in fact the last customer that I mentioned and that I was speaking to just this week was doing exactly that. So due to the existing situation, their existing on-premises environment, their Horizon and their vSphere environment, is pretty much at capacity with the amount of their employees that are working remotely or that are working from home, so they want to rapidly deploy a new horizon pod out in the cloud, as an extension of their environment. And VMware Cloud on AWS is the only offering that supports Horizon Cloud pod architecture, so it’s an ideal landing place as it allows them to build out a new pod, but incorporate that with their existing environment so it performs and is managed like a single global entity.

So, an outside of the digital workspace kind of use case, there’s also a disaster recovery as a service add-on the VMware Cloud on AWS, which brings into play VMware site Recovery Manager to automate and replicate the failover of an on-premise VMware environment into VMware Cloud on AWS.

00:12:44 Stuart Robinson

And Chris, from the Amazon point of view, are you seeing exactly the same kind of thing? Is this what you’re seeing real world applications as?

00:12:53 Chris Porter

Yeah, I sort of echo Andy’s sentiments around seeing the use cases certainly around VDI. So, whether that’s Horizon or Citrix, we’re seeing customers filling their production capacity, then filling their DR capacity and having nowhere else to re-service the big increase they’ve seen in employees working from home and as Andy said, the cloud pocket architecture support for Horizon means that it’s really straightforward to get your head around how you use VMware Cloud on AWS to augment your on-prem Horizon environment. And then there are kind of unique capabilities that you can start to leverage with that to start to supplement the horizon deployment with AWS native services. So there is support for the RDS platform, Amazon RDS, which is our relational database service management for databases that supports Microsoft SQL, so you can use the Horizon and connection database and deploy that there, so you don’t need to stand up a database server as you’re trying to get that pod online. And we also have support for the ELB’s in the Horizon environment as well, so you can use that to front your global load balancing service for Horizon. So we’re seeing customers start to leverage those capabilities and start to realize the benefits of a hybrid environment between the VMware Cloud stack and AWS native services as well.

00:14:19 Stuart Robinson

And bringing it back to our current situation and so much of the country working from home, do you reckon there’s a lot of businesses and a lot of employers that will see many of the benefits of home working? Some people I’ve been talking to have actually seen an increase in productivity since people have been working from home. Do you reckon this might light a fire under people and they’ll be more work from home once this crisis is over?

00:14:43 Christ Porter

Yeah, I absolutely do. I think this, we’ll see a big shift in people’s views of working from home and it’s a massive test of those capabilities. It’s not a pilot or a POC or a few privileged people that get the capability. It’s huge parts of the workforce for hundreds if not thousands of employers now using this in anger, the working from home capabilities, and the real great advantage of using this on the AWS cloud is you can try it out burst as you need to to support this, and then maybe scale that back down if you want to return to the ways of working that you were before this, or keep some of that capacity, maybe not all of it, or in fact look to extend that capacity once this crisis is over to support the ways of working that you’ve evolved while this crisis is happening.

00:15:29 Stuart Robinson

So, big future for remote working. Bringing this all back onto the AWS side of things. AWS has got a vast array of tools and services available and I read on Amazons VMware Cloud on AWS page there are actually 165+ services that are available to VMware Cloud on AWS users. Could you summarize for us and our listeners you know the best ways to boost your organization’s capabilities by harnessing native AWS services?

00:15:57 Chris Porter

Yeah, sure we kind of approach this looking at a kind of migrate and then a modernize phase. So, the migrate phase, you might leverage some of the technologies that Andy and myself we’ve talked about, in terms of looking at direct connect to give you that real, dependable, lease line type connectivity into VMware Cloud on AWS. That direct connect capability is an AWS Native service and it’s fully supported with VMware Cloud on AWS. You could also look to leverage our services like load balancing services, looking at relational database services as well to connect into your VMware cloud. So, we have an example of a private sector bank in India, they migrated their CRM application into VMware Cloud on AWS and they migrated all of their environments; their prod UAT, their test in dev environments. But because of licensing requirements and the management overhead of their databases, they decided to move the databases that support that application into our RDS or Amazon RDS manage database platform, and then create a hybrid solution between the two. Then, once you’ve kind of got that migrate phase underway and you started to maybe optimize their applications using things like RDS, there’s also some capabilities there around, you can use our load balancers to perhaps bring your own IP addresses if you want some white listing, so bring your own IP addresses isn’t natively supported with VMware Cloud on AWS but it is something that we support within the AWS native platform, and so because you get that ENI connectivity that Andy mentioned earlier, connecting the two within the same availability zone to connect to those services, you can front that with that load balancer in the AWS environment to then connect to services that are running on the VMware Cloud on AWS environment.

And then we see people leverage EC2 connectivity as well, so S&P Global Ratings are a big customer of ours, they are also using VMware Cloud on AWS and they’re using them, starting to modernize applications to start to leverage EC2 to connect to those applications running on VMware Cloud on AWS. And then you can start to look at that kind of modernize phase, whether that be optimization of your procedures and processes using some of our systems manager technology to do things like patching, or to look at a kind of longer-term view of modernizing your applications where you can start to perhaps build some kind of data Lake where you can use our late formation technology on top of S3. You can start to use Amazon Redshift as a data warehousing technology, start to use that data that you’ve got in a VMware cloud environment you’ve now migrated into that environment that perhaps was at the end of a VPN connection or lease line connection to the cloud, so you wouldn’t necessarily have wanted to use that data, because of the impact of put on that line of migrating it to AWS. Now you’ve got that right next to these AWS services, so you can start to use those services to really analyze and look at the data and then from there you can then start to use some of our machine learning technologies, such as SageMaker, to really get some real insights and modernize your application.

00:18:55 Stuart Robinson

That’s absolutely brilliant and I was reading on the website that you can also integrate Lambda into it, so Amazon Serverless Technologies and what’s their kind of applications like that?

00:19:06 Christ Porter

Yeah, so Lambda is a hugely successful service that AWS run and you can get started really quickly with Lambda with a wide range of languages. Because Lambda will sit within and has connectivity to the VPC that you can then connect by that ENI into the VMware Cloud environment, you can start to use it to supplement or even completely re-write the applications that you were running in the VMware Cloud environment. Or you can simply use it as kind of a Cron environment, to kind of schedule operational tasks that you were having within the VMware environment that you can now start to leverage Lambda to really quickly and simply start writing those scripts that you might have and those batch jobs to start writing and using them within Lambda

00:19:51 Stuart Robinson

So what I’m hearing here is, you know, you’ve got these two monoliths of technology and the sky is the limit, there is absolutely nothing you can’t do in this brilliant pairing. I mean, Andy, you’ve been hands on with VMware Cloud on AWS for some time now. Do you back up everything that Chris is saying? If you got any other services that you’ve been using?

00:20:09 Andy Hine

So yeah, yeah, I absolutely back up what Chris is saying there. Whilst VMware Cloud on AWS gives you that really ease of migration for workloads as is, so that were previously running on premise on vSphere. It’s a great foot in the door to start leveraging some of the native services, so we’ve touched on things like RDS for migrate your databases, and we’ve seen customers interested in Amazon FX for Windows file sharing as a much better method of moving or hosting large amounts of file data user data than using expensive vSan storage within the VMware Cloud and AWS solution. We have customers using Amazon VPC to host transit gateways for additional things like intrusion protection and web filtering services and that kind of thing. But I think what I see him in my job as well, is that a lot of talk around cloud native applications and that showing that shift which is going to have to happen when companies break away from the kind of the monolithical application approach and into more microservices. And that’s when you can, you would start picking up more platform services from guys like Amazon, and once you’re in the VMware Cloud on AWS environment that it makes it really easy to start doing.

00:21:20 Stuart Robinson

Thank you very much. And Chris, have you got any closing thoughts? I mean in your experience, what are the biggest questions that you hear consumers asking?

00:21:28 Chris Porter

Yeah, I think in terms of closing, I think you need to, when assessing VMware Cloud on AWS, you need to look at the fact that one of the huge benefits of it is it looks exactly the same as what you’re running on Prem and integrates really well with what you’ve got on Prem. But there are some ideas and concepts you need to look at and think of that give you some differences and that it’s not a negative thing, there are some positives. So, we’ve talked around where you might consider actually moving maybe a database platform rather than into VMware Cloud on AWS. Look at, does that make more sense to run in an AWS native? Also, simple things like the fact that with VMware cloud on AWS we’re leveraging the elastic capability of the underlying AWS cloud, which means we can spin up new hosts within 15 minutes and in fact I think it’s less and it’s 12 minutes, so that allows you to resize the cluster very quickly, but it’s also something that’s then leveraged if there’s a failure of the hardware or when there’s maintenance happening. So the minimum number of hosts you need in the cluster is 3 nodes and you don’t need to really add another node to have capacity when there’s an HA event or a maintenance event, because we’ll add that capacity for you automatically. Whereas on Prem really with vSan, you’d want to have a minimum of four nodes so that you’ve always got that HA maintenance capacity there. So, there are some considerations, but they’re really considerations that give you benefits of leveraging the cloud as well underneath.

00:22:55 Andy Hine

In terms of, just following up on that readiness topic, a part of my job is obviously taking the customer through that readiness and that design stage, and that’s a real critical point when you’re looking at adopting VMware Cloud on AWS. So just to understand how you’re going to integrate, if you plan to integrate on premise, how is that going to work? What networking services do you need to use to enable that to happen? Are you going to use things like them as VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension to stretch any of your networks into VMware Cloud on AWS? And there’s some fundamental kind of design choices that you need to get correct upfront and so, for example, whether your cluster needs to be stretched or not for higher availability, that can’t be undone once you make a decision without starting again. And similarly, the network ranges that you attribute or assigned to VMware on AWS, you need to get those right in advance. And on the networking side we see a lot of our customers leveraging the partner ecosystem; so guys like Equinix with their cloud exchange product to really accelerate that networking connectivity into VMware Cloud on AWS.

00:24:06 Stuart Robinson

You mentioned networking a few times in there and I know that VMware Cloud on AWS actually comes with VCF and therefore gets installed with vSan and NSX. It’s currently coming out with NSX T does it matter if you have NSX V installed in your current on Prem environment?

00:24:22 Chris Porter

Yeah, so whilst VMware Cloud on AWS sits on top of, or uses NSX T there’s no requirement for you to have NSX on Prem, and if you have an NSX V on Prem then that’s supported to be able to migrate workloads into VMware Cloud on AWS.

00:24:42 Stuart Robinson

Perfect and Andy, how do business actually get started on VMware Cloud on a AWS?

00:24:48 Andy Hine

In terms of how you get started, to directly answer the question then we would love you to talk to Xtravirt, love you to talk to us. We’re at a top tier principle VMware partner and have been for a long period of time and have, you know, the highest accreditation possible. We’ve got all five of VMware Master services competencies, including one specifically for the VMware Cloud on AWS and we’ve been well accustomed to the product since its early days, really.

So, wherever you really are on that journey, we can help you. So, for example, in my team in pre-sales we can help you with anything from the initial conversation to getting a handle on your requirements and providing you with technical detail and solution overviews and doing some Q&A with you, as well as sizing and potentially pricing your VMware Cloud on AWS platform.

In our delivery teams, we’ve got full lifecycle services around VMware Cloud on AWS, so from that cloud readiness to the application discovery and you know, working out what your use cases and your good application candidates are through planning, design, implementation and migration all the way through to kind of managed support once the project is completely really.

So, if you’re after help in your project, whether it’s something pre-packaged you’re looking for, or whether it’s a tailor service, we’d love you to contact us, which you can do by emailing info@xtravirt.com. That will start the conversation and make sure you will get through to the correct teams. And if you want to just finish yourself with a little bit more knowledge before engaging, then you can head over to our mini site which is at xtravirt.com/vmc-aws.

00:26:24 Stuart Robinson

Thank you very much. So guys, thanks very much, and if anyone would like to reach out and talk to you, Chris, from your point of view, if anyone wants to talk to Amazon, where would be the best place they could go to talk to them about VMware Cloud on AWS?

00:26:38 Chris Porter

Yeah, I mean the best place we go to is aws.amazon.com/VMware. There’s some info there. There’s a really good FAQ and there’s also on that page there’s a big contact US button, so hit that and that will come through to us and we’ll reach back out to you and help you out with your enqueries.

00:26:57 Stuart Robinson

And if anyone wanted to reach out to you specifically, what’s the best way for people to reach out to you?

00:27:01 Chris Porter

The best way is probably to findme on Twitter, you can find me on @uprightvinyl.

00:27:07 Stuart Robinson

And the first thing you do when you go to that is ask him why the Twitter handle because it’s quite a cool story. And Andy, what’s the best way for people to reach out to you, yeah?

00:27:16 Andy Hine

Yeah, so to reach out to me directly I’m also on Twitter and my handle is @andyhine09.

00:27:22 Stuart Robinson

Cool, thank you very much. And if you’d like to reach out to Cloud Insiders, you can get us on Twitter @cloudinsiders. For any ideas or questions related to the podcast you can reach us on team@cloudinsiders.fm. You can get episodes of the podcast where you usually find your podcast. We’re on iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Soundcloud’s iHeartRadio, the list goes on and on and on. We’ve put every single episode up on YouTube. Just search Cloud Insiders or visit our website cloudinsiders.fm.

For more information on Xtravirt and their services you can visit Xtravirt.com that’s X-T-R-A-V-I-`R-T.com or send an email to an email to info@xtravirt.com.

Gentlemen, thank you so much for your time, it’s been genuinely enlightening and to you at home. Thank you so much for listening, and we’ll catch you next time.