There has been a huge amount of new features / updates / services added to the VMware Cloud on AWS Platform. The below is a list of my top four favorites, there is well over 25 new enhancements, the full list can be found here.
VMware Transit Connect Intra-Region Peering with AWS Transit Gateway: This feature enables VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC customers to peer their VMware Transit Connect with AWS Transit Gateway (TGW) in the same region. With this, customers can establish high bandwidth connectivity between their VMC SDDC Group and AWS TGW, enabling seamless access to AWS VPC resources at scale without the need for a Transit VPC. This further simplifies access between VMware Cloud on AWS resources and AWS VPC resources, while retaining control over connectivity in the respective environments. Learn more
Amazon FSx with NetApp ONTAP Integration (Preview): Announcing preview of Amazon FSx with NetApp ONTAP Integration – an NFS datastore for VMware Cloud on AWS. With this capability, you can attach a fully managed, low cost, high performance NFS datastore built on NetApp’s ONTAP file system to the VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC and scale their storage environment as needed without the need to purchase additional host instances. Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP offers high-performance file storage with compression and deduplication to help you further reduce storage costs. It provides ONTAP’s data management capabilities, like snapshots, clones, and replication across your hybrid cloud environment that will improve staff productivity and responsiveness. Learn more. We are opening early access nominations for this capability now. So, if you are interested in learning more about the early access program, please send an email to vmc_fsx_ea@vmware.com
You can also see the AWS blog on this new service here.
3+ hosts SDDC Cluster scale down: Customers can start their hybrid cloud journey by starting small with 2-host i3.metal or i3en.metal clusters as the primary clusters within an SDDC as well as secondary clusters within an existing SDDC and they can scale up as per their needs. However, scaling down from 3+ hosts to 2-hosts SDDC cluster was not supported previously. With the introduction of this new capability, customers will be able to scale down 3+ hosts SDDC cluster to 2-hosts in single AZ primary or secondary clusters. Once scale down is completed, EDRS
VMware HCX: High availability of Network Extension: VMware HCX Network Extension bridges networks between VMware HCX and activated data centers by extending the Virtual Machine networks to a VMware HCX remote site. Previously, Network Extension service cannot survive unexpected appliance (VM) level failures such as failures due to kernel issues or underlying ESXi host issues and, there was no fault tolerant mechanism in place to automatically recover from such problems. With this new capability, VMware HCX now uses a High Availability (HA) setup with a pair of appliances both at the source and the destination site in a standby/active mode such that if the active appliance fails, traffic is rerouted to the standby appliance which becomes the new active appliance. This failover would be automatic in nature once the HA is configured and would ensure overall higher resiliency of the system., thus preventing any downtime in case of appliance failure.
