VMware on AWS: Low-risk option or security blanket for those who don't like change?

It's London's turn with AWS Transformation Day, where attendees endure a cacophony of buzzwords intended to hammer home the message that Amazon's cloud is where you wanna be. Kicking off the proceedings was a session by John Enoch, VMware Technical Business Development principal, on the merits of VMware on AWS in your …

[MrBoring]

Lots of businesses don't like change, even if their IT depts are screaming for it. VMC on AWS is ideal for those scenarios.

The tech (HCX) to migrate your aging on-prem to VMC is really easy and painless.

Once Azure offers the same service globally, prices should come down.

[Cloud, what..... Sorry... Um... - you just made that up.]

I think generally the business is screaming for change and driving the IT department who would happily keep it on prem. When the new CTO CEO comes along obviously there will be a cloud first policy, due to too many conferences.

But if you are going to move your VMs to the cloud, why pay twice as much to run it on a vmware platform.

Just do a V2V migration and learn the new AWS/AzURe/cloud of choice interface.

[Anonymous Coward]

Lots of businesses like change, especially when execs fall in love with a new fad whether it's good for the business or not, even if their IT depts are screaming it's a bad idea.

[AMBxx]

History may not repeat, but it does rhyme

Anyone else thinking of Novell Netware - when they realised they'd lost out to Windows in the fields of both application servers and file servers, they talked about their great future in Authentication.

Unless VMWare get their own cloud, I don't see much future beyond being a management layer on top of Azure or AWS. There's already plenty of competition there.

[Glennda37]

Re: History may not repeat, but it does rhyme

You talking just about vsphere it isn't their only product and not everybody loves the cloud... you can't sweat your assets is one example (Servers can have a rack life now nearing 7 years comfortably). You can't shift it (as easily) to large capex investments. Not all companies (particularly larger legacy ones) like ongoing opex costs being higher.

You also have the smaller SMB businesses (albeit they tend to use cheaper vmware products like Vsphere essentials etc). Cloud is expensive so them, yes they can easily push email to O365 etc but there is still lots of legacy LOB applications which run on servers in peoples offices. This is just not cost effective for them to move to the cloud.

They will however lose a section of the market but not all of it.

[hmas]

Re: History may not repeat, but it does rhyme

VMWare have an excellent revenue stream, autonomy and deep pockets and have made some canny acquisitions over the past few years to ensure this isn't the case.

SDWAN and SDN - Velocloud and NSX

EDR/Antivirus - Carbon Black

MDM/MAM - Airwatch

There have also been other developments such as ESX on ARM that whilst it was a bit of a giggle at last year's VMWorld has serious real world potential in IoT scenarios (small Linux distros on wind turbines, Mobile Communication Gateways)

Whilst I would question the business case behind running significant sized workloads in this manner rather than transformation, thereare plenty of organisations running legacy applications on Windows 2000/2003, XP, etc... that would be interested in divesting themselves of the hassle of maintaining data centres fror this purpose.

[Anonymous Coward]

Who are the customers for cloud?

The problem here is VMware's customers are IT operations. Cloud computing providers' customers are developers.

IT operations and Cloud computing providers are direct competitors for the compute needs of end users (application owners and developers).

Put VMware on the cloud, and it forces the application owners and developers to have to deal with the same people (IT operations) who caused them to bypass IT and go to the cloud.

No developer wants to put in an ITSM ticket to get a VM. They don't want to have to put in another ticket to get additional storage. They don't want to put in a third ticket to get a VLAN. They want to go to a self-service portal and click on a VM, click again to get an EBS Volume, and click again to provision networking to their application.

[DonL]

Re: Who are the customers for cloud?

"They want to go to a self-service portal and click on a VM, click again to get an EBS Volume, and click again to provision networking to their application."

VMware vCenter provides this functionality.

[Cloud, what..... Sorry... Um... - you just made that up.]

Re: Who are the customers for cloud?

The developers don’t have rights to vcenter. They do however have rights to the cloud portal kindly granted by their credit card.

I do see your point though.

[DonL]

Re: Who are the customers for cloud?

"The developers don’t have rights to vcenter."

IT departments being overly protective will have a hard time indeed, but it's easily possible to limit user rights so nothing can go wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Who are the customers for cloud?

And this is why you constantly see leaked data inside buckets and blobs because many developers don't have a clue what they are dong when they provision stuff themselves.