VMware has hit back at Amazon’s sneaky “stealth attack” on its vCenter management console in a carefully worded blog post that aims to dissuade users from embracing its new rival.

It follows last week’s announcement of a new AWS Connector for vCenter plug-in that makes it easier for admins to manage and migrate workloads from vCenter to AWS’ cloud. The free software is a direct rival to VMware’s own vCHS, which delivers more or less the same functionality, only with the company’s own private cloud.

Unsurprisingly, VMware is less than impressed with what AWS is up to, and said as much in a politely-worded blog post that does little to conceal its displeasure.

“Don’t be fooled by Import Tools disguised as Hybrid Cloud Management,” writes VMware’s chief technology officer for the Americas, Chris Wolf.

“Hybrid cloud architects want as few variables in the architecture as possible because the greater the variation the more costly automation becomes at scale, and that extends to management products,” he adds. “When you get past the marketing and really examine technical architectures, converting the virtual machine, migrating the app and the data is the easy part. Rebuilding the management infrastructure is anything but ‘easy.’ Management dependencies are massive and are like a game of Jenga. Take one away and the whole service stack can come tumbling down.”

In other words, what VMware’s saying is that Amazon’s plug-in is a bit of a botch-job, and that anyone who adopts it could quickly come to regret it.

Wolf goes on to outline several drawbacks of AWS’ new plug-in, including the fact that there’s no easy way to move workloads back to on-premise data centers or another cloud. Other limitations include “you cannot use your existing software licenses … you cannot automate and orchestrate across private and public clouds … you cannot enforce policy governance across multi-clouds … you lose all of the seamless third party integrations deployed through the VMware Solution Exchange,” says Wolf.

“In the cloud era more than ever, you must think strategically about management,” Wolf continues. “To date, proprietary service provider tools have created management silos that drive up total cost of ownership while increasing provider lock-in. There is a better way.”

And that would be by sticking with VMware, naturally.

In some ways things have come full circle for VMware with this new threat. Not long ago VMware was trying to do exactly what Amazon is doing now, pushing its way into enterprise data centers with its ESX hypervisor. VMware’s tech was adopted en masse, causing the likes of Amazon, Microsoft and Google to develop their own hypervisors in a desperate bid to catch up.

VMware’s rivals are now slowly eating away at its bottom line. Amazon’s Xen in particular is a threat, as companies might be willing to explore the greater utility it offers even if it raises the specter of lock-in. But that’s all par for the course – Amazon is also set to come under attack, if you believe Gartner, with Microsoft, Google and perhaps even VMware’s own vCHS cloud all threatening to eat into its cloud empire.