VMware Cloud (VMC) on AWS in Sydney - Easy vmotion to VMC using Layer 2 VPN to the Cloud

VMware on AWS is now available in Sydney region:

https://cloud.vmware.com/vmc-aws

https://aws.amazon.com/vmware/

Sydney Pricing in AU$:

(Note addition 10% discount for each VMware product such as vSphere, vSAN, NSX - max 25% discount)

It is essentially AWS EC2 i3.metal server (36 CPU cores 512GB RAM, 15TB NVMe SSD) with vSAN for storage:

https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/i3/

There seems to be a consistent message that VMware Cloud on AWS is lower cost and more agile than VMware on-prem, yesterday I was surprised to hear the same message during vForum presentation:
https://vmcsizer.vmware.com (comparison onf VMC on to VMware on-prem infrastructure)

I had a brief discussion with presenter afterwards and he mentioned that that we do not even need NSX in our on-prem environment and can use free NSX Standalone Edge appliance to  be deployed in the customer’s environment for the stretching of on-premises VLANs to the AWS based SDDC VMC using L2VPN. Once customers stretch VLAN to VMC then they can vmotion on-prem VMs to VMC and vice versa. The VMs IP addresses do not change as all the VLANs are stretched to VMC. That seems very cool! 

See details below:

https://fojta.wordpress.com/tag/l2vpn/
https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/vcat/vmware-customer-onboarding-with-nsx-l2vpn-services.pdf
https://www.brianjgraf.com/2018/02/08/vmotion-virtual-machines-from-on-prem-to-vmware-cloud-on-aws-with-ease-heres-how/

VMC has Elastic DRS to allow VMware cluster to scale up/down depending on utilisation. This elasticity allows you to right-size your SDDC environment for the current workload demand. No more long procurement process, no more waiting for the vendor to ship the goods. Completely automatic.

http://frankdenneman.nl/2018/07/17/introduction-elastic-drs/

EDRS provides two scaling policy that optimizes for cost or performance:

Additional Notes:

• VMC APIs and sample code
• VMC does not have self service portal to provision VMs, yet could use open source http://vonecloud.today/
• VMs, backup feature..yet could use Veeam or other backup products

VMC looks very good, yet traditional on-premise VMware infrastructure can have the following advantages:

• On-prem infrastructure does not have compliance, data sovereignty implications 
• On-prem infrastructure does not require any change.
• No latency implications (this is particularly of concern for customers outside of Sydney) 
• If significant compute/storage/networking/VMware is still required on legacy on-premise data center then customer will need staff to maintain data center and all associated infrastructure. As such a partial migration to VMC creates additional complexity and no significant costs savings can be realised.
• VMs with high capacity storage requirements can potentially be more expensive on VMC.