VMware on AWS My Thoughts

As VMworld 2017 has just finished I have been giving VMware on AWS some thought.  Lot’s of questions have been running through my head, so I thought I would try and transcribe some here.

What Is It?

It’s a minimum of 4 x of vSphere Hosts running VMware’s SDDC (ESXi, NSX and vSAN) which is dedicated to a customer.  VMware manage the availability, patching and maintenance whilst the customer consumes the resources.

Each ESXi Host provides 36 x CPU Cores, 512GB RAM and 8 NVMe drives.  Some of this space is dedicated to management items such as vCenter and NSX VM’s so overall usable resources will be less.

Why Would I Use It?

This is a question I have been pondering on, my initial thoughts are:

• A customers infrastructure lifecycle is at the point of refresh and they are moving to an ‘opex model’
• A customer needs to exit a datacentre quickly and this could be one of a number of options
• A customer is deploying a remote office and doesn’t want to invest in on-premises infrastructure for their VM estate
• Target for disaster recovery to reduce on-premises secondary datacentre footprint (not sure if SRM is supported yet)

Even though I’m not convinced by this one, a potential candidate for a use case is to extend your on-premises operational model to AWS.

Another one which I’m not convinced by is reducing your on-premises operational costs by having someone else manage maintenance by patching your storage, ESXi Hosts and vCenter.  Are companies really going to make Dave redundant? Nope they are just going to get Dave doing something different for that one day a month (or Dave gets to chill out).

Would I Recommend It?

The concise answer is potentially.  The customers that I work with are reviewing their application estate and looking to either keep, kill, consolidate or transform them.

• The keep category often fall into ‘that’s too difficult to tackle basket’ or we have only just invested in a new application or release
• Kill generally means that the application will be ‘withered on the vine’
• Consolidate generally means a number of applications will be collapsed into a single master
• Transform usually means from on-premises to a SaaS type offering for example Exchange On-Premises to Office 365 Exchange Online

Out of these, which are the use cases for VMware on AWS?  The answer is simple anything heritage AKA Virtual Machine, as PaaS and SaaS will go somewhere else.

Infrastructure Applications such as Active Directory Domain Services, Certificate Services, File, Print and SQL are either highly available natively or can be designed and deployed on IaaS in a highly available fashion and as such aren’t great candidates for VMware on AWS.

Whats The Cost?

The monthly cost of an one year reserved ESXi Host (30% discount) is $4,332.00 of which we need four which makes the monthly cost roughly $17,328.00 which is circa £13,500 per month or £162,000 per year for compute and storage.  Note network charges and Operating System licenses are not included.

Using the same 30% discount level on Microsoft Azure you could run:

• 268 x A2 v2 VM continuously for 12 months
• 143 x D2 v2 VM continuously for 12 months

Taking into account that a single ESXi Host is used for tolerate failures.  We have 1,536GB of RAM minus circa 10% of management cluster and general overhead gives circa 1,382GB of useable RAM.

Using the same RAM metrics as the above Azure VM’s you could run the equivalent of:

• 346 x A2 VM’s using VMware on AWS
• 197 x D2 VM’s using VMware on AWS

Final Thought

Generally I’m seeing customers moving to a PaaS or SaaS offering for low hanging fruit and then dealing with the more complex applications on a case by case basis with a view to transforming these into a PaaS or SaaS model.

If customers are migrating 100 plus heritage VM’s to a cloud platform and they cannot be re-architected to be natively highly or have an SLA that simple backup and restore routines will not cater for then VMware on AWS is a viable option.

I do see that VMware on AWS has a place in the market, however the place is for heritage systems and I wonder how long it will be until the earnings from VMware on AWS start to dwindle?