VMware recently announced that VMware Cloud on AWS is now available in the AWS Asia-Pacific (Melbourne) Region. I thought I’d share some brief thoughts here along with a video I did with my colleague Satya.
What?
VMware Cloud on AWS is now available to consume in three Availability Zones (apse4-az1, apse4-az2, apse4-az3) in the Melbourne Region. From a host type – you have the option to deploy either I3en.metal or I4i.metal hosts. There is also support for stretched clusters and PCI-DSS compliance if required. The full list of VMware Cloud on AWS Regions and Availability Zones is here.
Why Is This Interesting?
Since the launch of VMware Cloud on AWS, customers have only had one choice when it comes to a Region – Sydney. This announcement gives organisations the ability to deploy architectures that can benefit from both increased availability and resiliency by leveraging multi-regional capabilities.
Availability
VMware Cloud on AWS already offers platform availability at a number of levels, including a choice of Availability Zones, Partition Placement groups, and support for stretched clusters across two Availability Zones. There’s also support for VMware High Availability, as well as support for automatically remediating failed hosts.
Resilience
In addition to the availability options customers can take advantage of, VMware Cloud on AWS also provides support for a number of resilience solutions, including VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery (VCDR) and VMware Site Recovery. Previously, customers in Australia and New Zealand were able to leverage these VMware (or third-party) solutions and deploy them across multiple Availability Zones. Invariably, it would look like the below diagram, with workloads hosted in one Availability Zone, and a second Availability Zone being used as the recovery location for those production workloads.
With the introduction of a second Region in A/NZ, customers can now look to deploy resilience solutions that are more like this diagram:
In this example, they can choose to run production workloads in the Melbourne Region and recover workloads into the Sydney Region if something goes pear-shaped. Note that VCDR is not currently available to deploy in the Melbourne Region, although it’s expected to be made available before the end of 2023.
Why Else Should I Care?
Data Sovereignty
There are a variety of legal, regulatory, and administrative obligations governing the access, use, security and preservation of information within various government and commercial organisations in Victoria. These regulations are both national and state-based, and in the case of the Melbourne Region, provide organisations in Victoria the opportunity to store data in VMware Cloud on AWS that may not otherwise have been possible.
Data Locality
Not all applications and data reside in the same location. Many organisations have a mix of workloads residing on-premises and in the cloud. Some of these applications are latency-sensitive, and the launch of the Melbourne Region provides organisations with the ability to host applications closer to that data, as well as accessing native AWS services with improved responsiveness over applications hosted in the Sydney Region.
How?
If you’re an existing VMware Cloud on AWS customer, head over to https://cloud.vmware.com. Login to the Cloud Services Console. Click on the VMware Cloud on AWS tile. Click on Inventory. Then click on Create SDDC.
Thoughts
Some of the folks in the US and Europe are probably wondering why on earth this is such a big deal for the Australian and New Zealand market. And plenty of folks in this part of the world are probably not that interested either. Not every organisation is going to benefit from or look to take advantage of the Melbourne Region. Many of them will continue to deploy workloads into one or two of the Sydney-based Availability Zones, with DR in another Availability Zone, and not need to do any more. But for those organisations looking for resiliency across geographical regions, this is a great opportunity to really do some interesting stuff from a disaster recovery perspective. And while it seems delightfully antiquated to think that, in this global world we live in, some information can’t cross state lines, there are plenty of organisations in Victoria facing just that issue, and looking at ways to store that data in a sensible fashion close to home. Finally, we talk a lot about data having gravity, and this provides many organisations in Victoria with the ability to run workloads closer to that centre of data gravity.
If you’d like to hear me talking about this with my learned colleague Satya, you can check out the video here. Thanks to Satya for prompting me to do the recording, and for putting it all together. We’re aiming to do this more regularly on a variety of VMware-related topics, so keep an eye out.