In the last month, there has been over 20 new services, features and functionalities added to VMware Cloud on AWS. For keeping up to date with all the new cool stuff we add to the platform, you can bookmark this page: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Cloud-on-AWS/0/rn/vmc-on-aws-relnotes.html

Or you could just bookmark my page as well 🙂

First off, if your note sure what, or why you would want a stretched cluster, checkout this VMware Cloud Tech Zone link: https://vmc.techzone.vmware.com/vmc-arch/docs/compute/vmc-aws-stretched-cluster#sec403-sub1

Customers may now deploy a 4 host Stretched Cluster. With two hosts in both availability zones (AZs) and a managed witness in the third, the cluster can survive the loss of an entire AZ. This capability enables business-critical applications within VMware Cloud without rearchitecting for AWS Availability.

Prior to this update, the minimum VMC hosts required for a stretched cluster was 6. This update is perfect for customers with application that have very high availability requirements, while keeping the minimum required resources to run these applications.

With two hosts per AZ, vSAN depends on the Dual Site Mirror for resiliency and therefore comes with a 99.9% availability guarantee. This can be increased to 99.99% at any time by scaling up to a 6 host cluster.  

Elastic DRS storage-only scale-out is enabled by default. If a 4 host stretched cluster is scaled out to a 6+ hosts for any reason, it cannot be scaled back down. For more information, please see this page