Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently announced the general availability of its Elastic VMware Service (EVS). This is a brief post covering what the service is, how it can be consumed, and why it might be of interest.

 

What Is It?

EVS is a service that provides the ability to run VMware Cloud Foundation (5.2.1) on AWS bare-metal instances (specifically I4i.metal). It’s a by-the-book consolidated architecture (running management and workload domains together), and contains the following VCF management components:

• ESXi hosts;
• vCenter Server instance;
• SDDC Manager;
• vSAN datastore;
• Three-node NSX Manager cluster;
• vSphere cluster; and
• NSX Edge cluster.

Storage is provided by vSAN (and selected third-party storage integrations), with two discrete network layers being delivered: the Amazon VPC and the VMware NSX overlay network. You can read more about the architecture here.

To consume the service, you’ll need 4 nodes to get started, along with at least 2 VPC Route Servers, and AWS Enterprise Support. There’s a pricing calculator on the AWS website. You’ll also need to procure VCF licensing from Broadcom or an authorised reseller.

 

Where Is It Available?

The initial launch Regions are:

• US East (North Virginia)
• US East (Ohio)
• US West (Oregon)
• Asia Pacific (Tokyo)
• Europe (Frankfurt)
• Europe (Ireland)

Availability in more Regions is planned for the future.

Other Considerations

Storage

You can leverage NetApp’s FSx for NetApp ONTAP service to provide additional storage for the cluster. There’s some useful guidance here and here. If you like it more orange, Pure Storage’s Cloud Block Store is also available for use with EVS. You can read that announcement here.

Clusters

Cluster sizes are currently limited to between 4 (minimum) and 16 (maximum) nodes. There is currently no support for stretched clusters. This will likely change in the future.

Add-ons

Services that VMware Cloud on AWS users may be familiar with, such as vDefend Advanced Threat Protection, and VMware Live Cyber Recovery, are not currently available with EVS.

Planning and Deployment

Much like VMC on AWS (and most other cloud service deployments, for that matter), there’s a bit of planning you’ll need to do before you jump on the console. There’s a handy checklist that takes you through all of the requirements here. It’s also worth noting that, unlike VMC on aWS, this isn’t a managed service, so some of the VPC constructs you see with VMC on AWS aren’t used with EVS. For example, there’s no shadow VPC deployed for EVS – it’s all done out of the customer account. And features like EDRS aren’t available, you need to manage your capacity yourself, in much the same way as you would do with an on-premises VCF deployment.

 

Thoughts

EVS is the same as VMC on AWS in the sense that it’s running VMware software on top of AWS bare metal servers. There are plenty of differences though, some of which I’ve covered above. I imagine many of the constraints around additional product integrations and scalability will be removed in the near future as the product evolves, and we’ll no doubt see some changes when it comes to partners offering managed services wrapped in with EVS. It’s been a while coming, but now that it’s here, I’m interested to see how the market responds. There are probably plenty of questions I haven’t answered, but there’s a useful FAQ document here.