8 ms·

VMware’s new cloud service will run on AWS

138 points by frostmatthew 10y ago

notimetorelax 10y ago
If I understand it right, this gives companies ability to shift their services to and from AWS relatively painlessly. Do other cloud provides offer anything comparable?
- Alupis 10y ago
  > shift their services to and from AWS relatively painlessly Couldn't you already do this? AWS lets you import/export in OVA (an open, standardized format which is cross-hypervisor compatible) and VMDK (VMware's proprietary virtual disk format)[1] [1] http://docs.aws.amazon.com/vm-import/latest/userguide/import-vm-image.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/vm-import/latest/userguide/import...
  - nolite 10y ago
    Kinda sucks for images that license to the network interface. They added elastic network interfaces, but you can't use those for eth0 (which a lot of software licenses to), so you're still screwed
    - Alupis 10y ago
      How do you mean? I've never personally dealt with software that licenses to a network interface (and the idea does seem silly...), so I can't fully comment on your situation, but it seems you could find out what specifically the license is attaching to and set that up again (if it's MAC, you just override the MAC, etc...). The software I've used that bound to the CPU (which is silly as well) always had a mechanism to "de-register" the software specifically for migrating to new hardware. So you could setup your vm, install all your software, etc... then de-register the software (but leave it installed). Make your "appliance" image (OVA), import to the new "cloud" and re-register your application.
      - sithadmin 10y ago
        >I've never personally dealt with software that licenses to a network interface (and the idea does seem silly...) This is super, super common with legacy software products narrowly scoped to very specific business functions.
      - toomuchtodo 10y ago
        Very common with niche analysis/grid computing apps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlexNet_Publisher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlexNet_Publisher
      - Keyframe 10y ago
        I've never personally dealt with software that licenses to a network interface (and the idea does seem silly...) This was super super super super fun on IRIX when NIC died. Usually in the midst of work chaos.
    - technion 10y ago
      I'll just be happy when I can stop dealing with products that license by USB dongles. Try putting THAT in AWS.
    - illumin8 10y ago
      I'm not sure you understand what was announced. The VMware Cloud on AWS will use standard vSphere Distributed Switch and NSX overlay networking. This means you can completely control what MAC and IP addresses get assigned to all of your VMs, and can hard code MAC addresses for those troublesome applications that hard-code their license to your NIC's MAC address. tl;dr In the VMware world you've always had the ability to specify your own MAC and IP address. In VMware Cloud on AWS you'll have the same ability.
      - nolite 10y ago
        re-reading my comment, I have no idea what I was thinking at the time... thanks
  - sithadmin 10y ago
    Aside from cases where you can just shoot a guest VM in the head and respawn it elsewhere (still relatively uncommon, especially in big vSphere shops), vSphere -> AWS has historically been a mostly one-way migration path, whereby the guest VM that's migrated lands in a new ecosystem that is beyond the reach of whatever vSphere management tools you have on hand (unless you're doing very heavy customization and extension of vRO+vRA). This move opens the gate to more seamless migration of workloads between on-premises vSphere clusters and AWS, and extends native vSphere management and configuration functions into AWS. For big vSphere shops with large investments in the platform (especially those running legacy workloads), this product offering is a very, very big deal. If the costs are right, it will put true hybrid cloud operating models into reach of a lot of Enterprises for which the pricing or level of effort to get there previously didn't make sense.
    - chx 10y ago
      shoot a guest VM in the head? That particular wording indicates you might have been doing Linux HA a little bit too much :)
      - GauntletWizard 10y ago
        No, actually, it's very common terminology among people managing large enough installations to "treat servers as cattle, not like pets". Re-deploying the entire service, with a copy of the previous data or without, should be a common exercise.
        chx 10y ago
        Is it really? I've never heard this particular wording before (and neither had Google, mind you) but it very strongly resembles Shoot The Other Node In The Head (STONITH).
        ckozlowski 10y ago
        We (I work for AWS) call it "Architecting for Failure", but yes, you could call it that too. =) In an ideal application, instances are a commodity. Not every workload is there yet, so there's a need still for individual instance recovery. But it's something we and our customers strive for.
- ensignavenger 10y ago
  Anyone who uses OpenStack, or Joyents Smart solution, Or Redhats cloud solution, or any number of other open source cloud platforms have this ability.
  - tw04 10y ago
    Those are all absolutely valid options, none of those "have this ability". Nothing in the open source world currently matches NSX's ability to extend the network from on-prem to the cloud. I really wish they did, but it's not even a discussion.
    - ensignavenger 10y ago
      Sorry, maybe I am misunderstanding what feature you are talking about. Al of the solutions mentioned are ones you can run on your own hardware, as well as their respective 'cloud' services, using the same APIs. Are you wanting some sort of live migration of vms between the two?
  - caraboga 10y ago
    Openstack doesn't have the in-product hooks to detect hardware failures on the host machine to prompt an automatic, vm-state preserving live migration to other hosts. If you are using kvm w.r.t. openstack, the vm machine actually is suspended by way of acpi, then moved, then unfrozen again. VMware doesn't do that in vmotion. All your problems with clock skew, dropping of network traffic are lessened (they don't completely go away) with vmotion.
- antaviana 10y ago
  I suppose that Microsoft with the combination of Azure+HyperV could end up owning this space.
- drieddust 10y ago
  Yes and no. This isn't any different from managed VMware solution provided by hosting companies but it's called cloud so naturally will get sold. Most Enterprise Customer's don't want to take any pain of redeploying the application to suit cloud. This becomes a tick in the box.
- jdc0589 10y ago
  Azure has a "Azure in your datacenter" thing. I can't remember what its actually called though.
  - sithadmin 10y ago
    Azure Stack.
- Thaxll 10y ago
  You move from AWS to something else that runs on AWS I mean what can you gain from that? Definitively not the price / resiliency.
  - toomuchtodo 10y ago
    Cheaper to move workloads onto your own gear sometimes. AWS margin is insane (upwards of 30-40%).
    - mrep 10y ago
      28.5% according to this article: http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/02/01/how-amazoncom-incs-cloud-business-is-doing-in-5-nu.aspx http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/02/01/how-amazonc...
    - technion 10y ago
      Yet AWS is much cheaper than vCloud Air. Although it's hard to compare, due to the way it's usually bundled with ISP agreements. This service will either need to choose between being much more expensive than raw AWS, and effectively killing Air overnight, regardless of the current claims.
      - toomuchtodo 10y ago
        Ehh, in the end, cloud orchestration is only going to get easier (lowest common denominator of primitives) and as long as you don't marry yourself to cloud provider-specific tooling, you'll be able to push your VMs and/or containers to where you can optimize for performance, cost, whatever. I think containers are hyped _far greater_ than the benefit that they provide, and I still think it'd be swank if you could have CDNs retrieve containers and run them at the POPs if your workflow allows for it. Interesting times and all that jazz.
user5994461 10y ago
Waiting to see the price list. AWS + VmWare is gonna break the sky.
- brazzledazzle 10y ago
  The only reason you're going to get this is because you have a bunch of existing infrastructure and experience and have a real need for it right?
  - user5994461 10y ago
    I can't think of any need for which "AWS + VmWare" would be the right choice.
    - brazzledazzle 10y ago
      Hybrid cloud where you need to move or scale infrastructure into AWS from your on-prem VMware environment would probably qualify.
      - user5994461 10y ago
        The topic is not hybrid cloud. The topic is to have a single AWS cloud that is running VmWare on top of the amazon servers.
        brazzledazzle 10y ago
        Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe the article actually discusses that one of the benefits is compatibility in hybrid cloud environments: >...it will be easy for customers to operate a consistent and seamless hybrid IT environment using their existing VMware tools on AWS...
- tracker1 10y ago
  That was my first thought... though I do think that some of VMWare's orchestration tools are a bit easier than AWS's... just the same, I'm thinking, wow that sounds expensive. Now I'm waiting for Oracle to buy out VMWare if this even looks like it will succeed.
SteveNuts 10y ago
I've heard "we tried to move our app to AWS but we couldn't tolerate instance failure so we moved back to on-prem" so many times in the past. I'm afraid managers are going to see this as an easy way to jump to the cloud and lift and drop their on-prem apps to AWS without re-architecting to handle failures and expect high uptime.
- user5994461 10y ago
  Clueless engineers. The AWS instances don't fail more often or any differently than old school servers. Source: I've got hundreds
  - sithadmin 10y ago
    >Clueless engineers. The AWS instances don't fail more often or any differently than old school servers. Instance and host reliability aren't the issue here. The issue is that a disgustingly high number of enterprises rely on vSphere High Availability and Fault-Tolerance features to restart VMs or keep them alive when an OS hangs or the host fails, instead of architecting for high availability at the app layer. To be entirely fair though, vSphere HA and FT are incredibly friendly to the bottom line relative to rebuilding apps that simply weren't designed for HA.
    - user5994461 10y ago
      My bad. I didn't get that you were talking about the built-in vSphere HA. This thing is truly amazing =) I thought it was the usual complain about AWS instances dying and needing to be replaced on regular basis. That thing is a myth. An instances can run for years without any issues, if noone stops it manually.
      - hodgesrm 10y ago
        Whether Amazon VMs go for years seems to be a matter of luck in my experience. You need to bake in HA for any service you really depend on either by having copies or ability to start new ones at will.
xorgar831 10y ago
I wonder if it'll integrate with other AWS services, such as ALBs and ASGs, I don't think VMware has any equivalent.
teilo 10y ago
There are other advantages to this beyond an alternative deployment method: Many vendor-supplied application stacks only support ESX. Yes, it is possible with some hacking, to get them on to EC2, but at the expense of losing vendor support. Furthermore, with this comes vMotion. EC2 has yet to implement live migration.
BucketSort 10y ago
Vendor lock in is reaching critical mass.
mbesto 10y ago
This is huge for a long list of middle market companies who shudder at the prospect of moving a data center from their on premise closet to a hosted solution while leveraging the same exact vSphere infrastructure they already have sunk time and money into.
- oxyclean 10y ago
  I have always been impressed with the amount of lock-in some companies have gotten themselves into with VMWare. Every place I've worked at which used VMWare, their tooling had a stranglehold on the entire business, with the exception of some totally greenfield stuff done on GCE or AWS.
jacquesm 10y ago
Am I wrong or is this VMware effectively throwing in the towel in their quest to compete with Amazon/The Cloud in general?
- caraboga 10y ago
  I think this is just embracing and extending. VMWare has the on premise infrastructure market cornered for the most part. But if they don't leverage that and pivot into using off premise stuff, then they stand to lose ground to Azure, as you can orchestrate just about all of Azure from Active Directory/Powershell. This is a good move on their part.

138 points by frostmatthew 10y ago

If I understand it right, this gives companies ability to shift their services to and from AWS relatively painlessly. Do other cloud provides offer anything comparable?

Alupis 10y ago
> shift their services to and from AWS relatively painlessly Couldn't you already do this? AWS lets you import/export in OVA (an open, standardized format which is cross-hypervisor compatible) and VMDK (VMware's proprietary virtual disk format)[1] [1] http://docs.aws.amazon.com/vm-import/latest/userguide/import-vm-image.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/vm-import/latest/userguide/import...
- nolite 10y ago
  Kinda sucks for images that license to the network interface. They added elastic network interfaces, but you can't use those for eth0 (which a lot of software licenses to), so you're still screwed
  - Alupis 10y ago
    How do you mean? I've never personally dealt with software that licenses to a network interface (and the idea does seem silly...), so I can't fully comment on your situation, but it seems you could find out what specifically the license is attaching to and set that up again (if it's MAC, you just override the MAC, etc...). The software I've used that bound to the CPU (which is silly as well) always had a mechanism to "de-register" the software specifically for migrating to new hardware. So you could setup your vm, install all your software, etc... then de-register the software (but leave it installed). Make your "appliance" image (OVA), import to the new "cloud" and re-register your application.
    - sithadmin 10y ago
      >I've never personally dealt with software that licenses to a network interface (and the idea does seem silly...) This is super, super common with legacy software products narrowly scoped to very specific business functions.
    - toomuchtodo 10y ago
      Very common with niche analysis/grid computing apps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlexNet_Publisher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlexNet_Publisher
    - Keyframe 10y ago
      I've never personally dealt with software that licenses to a network interface (and the idea does seem silly...) This was super super super super fun on IRIX when NIC died. Usually in the midst of work chaos.
  - technion 10y ago
    I'll just be happy when I can stop dealing with products that license by USB dongles. Try putting THAT in AWS.
  - illumin8 10y ago
    I'm not sure you understand what was announced. The VMware Cloud on AWS will use standard vSphere Distributed Switch and NSX overlay networking. This means you can completely control what MAC and IP addresses get assigned to all of your VMs, and can hard code MAC addresses for those troublesome applications that hard-code their license to your NIC's MAC address. tl;dr In the VMware world you've always had the ability to specify your own MAC and IP address. In VMware Cloud on AWS you'll have the same ability.
    - nolite 10y ago
      re-reading my comment, I have no idea what I was thinking at the time... thanks
- sithadmin 10y ago
  Aside from cases where you can just shoot a guest VM in the head and respawn it elsewhere (still relatively uncommon, especially in big vSphere shops), vSphere -> AWS has historically been a mostly one-way migration path, whereby the guest VM that's migrated lands in a new ecosystem that is beyond the reach of whatever vSphere management tools you have on hand (unless you're doing very heavy customization and extension of vRO+vRA). This move opens the gate to more seamless migration of workloads between on-premises vSphere clusters and AWS, and extends native vSphere management and configuration functions into AWS. For big vSphere shops with large investments in the platform (especially those running legacy workloads), this product offering is a very, very big deal. If the costs are right, it will put true hybrid cloud operating models into reach of a lot of Enterprises for which the pricing or level of effort to get there previously didn't make sense.
  - chx 10y ago
    shoot a guest VM in the head? That particular wording indicates you might have been doing Linux HA a little bit too much :)
    - GauntletWizard 10y ago
      No, actually, it's very common terminology among people managing large enough installations to "treat servers as cattle, not like pets". Re-deploying the entire service, with a copy of the previous data or without, should be a common exercise.
      - chx 10y ago
        Is it really? I've never heard this particular wording before (and neither had Google, mind you) but it very strongly resembles Shoot The Other Node In The Head (STONITH).
      - ckozlowski 10y ago
        We (I work for AWS) call it "Architecting for Failure", but yes, you could call it that too. =) In an ideal application, instances are a commodity. Not every workload is there yet, so there's a need still for individual instance recovery. But it's something we and our customers strive for.
ensignavenger 10y ago
Anyone who uses OpenStack, or Joyents Smart solution, Or Redhats cloud solution, or any number of other open source cloud platforms have this ability.
- tw04 10y ago
  Those are all absolutely valid options, none of those "have this ability". Nothing in the open source world currently matches NSX's ability to extend the network from on-prem to the cloud. I really wish they did, but it's not even a discussion.
  - ensignavenger 10y ago
    Sorry, maybe I am misunderstanding what feature you are talking about. Al of the solutions mentioned are ones you can run on your own hardware, as well as their respective 'cloud' services, using the same APIs. Are you wanting some sort of live migration of vms between the two?
- caraboga 10y ago
  Openstack doesn't have the in-product hooks to detect hardware failures on the host machine to prompt an automatic, vm-state preserving live migration to other hosts. If you are using kvm w.r.t. openstack, the vm machine actually is suspended by way of acpi, then moved, then unfrozen again. VMware doesn't do that in vmotion. All your problems with clock skew, dropping of network traffic are lessened (they don't completely go away) with vmotion.
antaviana 10y ago
I suppose that Microsoft with the combination of Azure+HyperV could end up owning this space.
drieddust 10y ago
Yes and no. This isn't any different from managed VMware solution provided by hosting companies but it's called cloud so naturally will get sold. Most Enterprise Customer's don't want to take any pain of redeploying the application to suit cloud. This becomes a tick in the box.
jdc0589 10y ago
Azure has a "Azure in your datacenter" thing. I can't remember what its actually called though.
- sithadmin 10y ago
  Azure Stack.
Thaxll 10y ago
You move from AWS to something else that runs on AWS I mean what can you gain from that? Definitively not the price / resiliency.
- toomuchtodo 10y ago
  Cheaper to move workloads onto your own gear sometimes. AWS margin is insane (upwards of 30-40%).
  - mrep 10y ago
    28.5% according to this article: http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/02/01/how-amazoncom-incs-cloud-business-is-doing-in-5-nu.aspx http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/02/01/how-amazonc...
  - technion 10y ago
    Yet AWS is much cheaper than vCloud Air. Although it's hard to compare, due to the way it's usually bundled with ISP agreements. This service will either need to choose between being much more expensive than raw AWS, and effectively killing Air overnight, regardless of the current claims.
    - toomuchtodo 10y ago
      Ehh, in the end, cloud orchestration is only going to get easier (lowest common denominator of primitives) and as long as you don't marry yourself to cloud provider-specific tooling, you'll be able to push your VMs and/or containers to where you can optimize for performance, cost, whatever. I think containers are hyped _far greater_ than the benefit that they provide, and I still think it'd be swank if you could have CDNs retrieve containers and run them at the POPs if your workflow allows for it. Interesting times and all that jazz.

user5994461 10y ago

Waiting to see the price list. AWS + VmWare is gonna break the sky.

brazzledazzle 10y ago
The only reason you're going to get this is because you have a bunch of existing infrastructure and experience and have a real need for it right?
- user5994461 10y ago
  I can't think of any need for which "AWS + VmWare" would be the right choice.
  - brazzledazzle 10y ago
    Hybrid cloud where you need to move or scale infrastructure into AWS from your on-prem VMware environment would probably qualify.
    - user5994461 10y ago
      The topic is not hybrid cloud. The topic is to have a single AWS cloud that is running VmWare on top of the amazon servers.
      - brazzledazzle 10y ago
        Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe the article actually discusses that one of the benefits is compatibility in hybrid cloud environments: >...it will be easy for customers to operate a consistent and seamless hybrid IT environment using their existing VMware tools on AWS...
tracker1 10y ago
That was my first thought... though I do think that some of VMWare's orchestration tools are a bit easier than AWS's... just the same, I'm thinking, wow that sounds expensive. Now I'm waiting for Oracle to buy out VMWare if this even looks like it will succeed.

SteveNuts 10y ago

I've heard "we tried to move our app to AWS but we couldn't tolerate instance failure so we moved back to on-prem" so many times in the past. I'm afraid managers are going to see this as an easy way to jump to the cloud and lift and drop their on-prem apps to AWS without re-architecting to handle failures and expect high uptime.

user5994461 10y ago
Clueless engineers. The AWS instances don't fail more often or any differently than old school servers. Source: I've got hundreds
- sithadmin 10y ago
  >Clueless engineers. The AWS instances don't fail more often or any differently than old school servers. Instance and host reliability aren't the issue here. The issue is that a disgustingly high number of enterprises rely on vSphere High Availability and Fault-Tolerance features to restart VMs or keep them alive when an OS hangs or the host fails, instead of architecting for high availability at the app layer. To be entirely fair though, vSphere HA and FT are incredibly friendly to the bottom line relative to rebuilding apps that simply weren't designed for HA.
  - user5994461 10y ago
    My bad. I didn't get that you were talking about the built-in vSphere HA. This thing is truly amazing =) I thought it was the usual complain about AWS instances dying and needing to be replaced on regular basis. That thing is a myth. An instances can run for years without any issues, if noone stops it manually.
    - hodgesrm 10y ago
      Whether Amazon VMs go for years seems to be a matter of luck in my experience. You need to bake in HA for any service you really depend on either by having copies or ability to start new ones at will.

xorgar831 10y ago

I wonder if it'll integrate with other AWS services, such as ALBs and ASGs, I don't think VMware has any equivalent.

teilo 10y ago

There are other advantages to this beyond an alternative deployment method: Many vendor-supplied application stacks only support ESX. Yes, it is possible with some hacking, to get them on to EC2, but at the expense of losing vendor support. Furthermore, with this comes vMotion. EC2 has yet to implement live migration.

BucketSort 10y ago

Vendor lock in is reaching critical mass.

mbesto 10y ago

This is huge for a long list of middle market companies who shudder at the prospect of moving a data center from their on premise closet to a hosted solution while leveraging the same exact vSphere infrastructure they already have sunk time and money into.

oxyclean 10y ago
I have always been impressed with the amount of lock-in some companies have gotten themselves into with VMWare. Every place I've worked at which used VMWare, their tooling had a stranglehold on the entire business, with the exception of some totally greenfield stuff done on GCE or AWS.

jacquesm 10y ago

Am I wrong or is this VMware effectively throwing in the towel in their quest to compete with Amazon/The Cloud in general?

caraboga 10y ago
I think this is just embracing and extending. VMWare has the on premise infrastructure market cornered for the most part. But if they don't leverage that and pivot into using off premise stuff, then they stand to lose ground to Azure, as you can orchestrate just about all of Azure from Active Directory/Powershell. This is a good move on their part.