Virtualization software giant VMware Inc. today unveiled a flurry of new cloud services designed to improve its support for multicloud environments.

The updates give customers the ability to choose the most suitable cloud environment for each of their workloads without increasing operational complexity, the company said.

As well as expanding its cloud services, VMware said it’s making its VMware Cloud on AWS on-demand service, in partnership with public cloud giant Amazon Web Services Inc., available to European customers for the first time. That service also gains a wide range of new capabilities that help to simplify cloud migration and hybrid cloud deployments.

Finally, the company said it’s expanding the scope of its Partner Network program to give its partners the opportunity to benefit from its alliance with AWS.

Expanded cloud services

VMware’s cloud service updates include its new “Hybrid Cloud Extension Service for Private Cloud.” The service is designed to make it easier for customers to migrate their workloads between private clouds and private data centers by eliminating the need to make a lot of changes.

In line with that, VMware is upgrading its Cost Insight service with the ability to provide assessments for migrating workloads to VMware Cloud on AWS. The tool, which also supports AWS, Microsoft Azure and VMware private cloud data centers, allows customers to calculate the capacity requirements and costs for running applications on different public and private clouds.

“It takes a lot of the guesswork out of cloud migrations,” said Chris Wolf, VMware’s vice president and chief technology officer for global field and industry.

Of course, customers will still want to analyze the performance metrics of their applications regardless of where they’re hosted. To that end, VMware said its expanding its Wavefront by VMware service with 45 new integrations to do just that. The new integrations will “expand the set of information that can be unified, visualized and monitored,” the company said.

VMware also introduced a new Log Intelligence service for deeper insights into VMware data center and VMware Cloud on AWS operations.

“The announcements are about helping customers consume resources from a variety of different clouds while reinforcing enterprise IT requirements,“ Wolf said. “We’re making it possible to run, manage, connect and secure any cloud on any app on any device with a consistent set of service layers.”

VMware Cloud on AWS lands in Europe

The second part of VMware’s announcement relates to the general availability of VMware Cloud on AWS in Europe. The service is being launched in AWS’s London region, with availability in its Frankfurt region coming “soon.”

VMware Cloud on AWS is an on-demand service announced last year that lets customers run applications across vSphere-based cloud environments and access a range of AWS services at the same time. In other words, users can get all the benefits of Amazon’s public cloud, while managing these resources using VMware’s familiar tools.

VMware Cloud on AWS also gets a wealth of new capabilities designed to ease the migration of new workloads to the cloud. These include new mission-critical application protections that are designed to safeguard migrating apps from different types of failures including data center or availability zone outages, and host or virtual machine failures.

“We’re giving customers the ability to move to a cloud and have full access to on-premises services,” said Matt Garman, vice president of AWS Compute Services. He added that the company is seeing lots of use cases around cloud migrations, infrastructure refreshes and data center expansions. “VMware cloud on AWS allows them to seamlessly move those workloads without any downtime,” he said.

Another new feature is something called data-intensive application enhancements that take advantage of VMware’s native vSAN compression and deduplication technologies to reduce the Total Cost of Ownership for customers. The company claims users can cut storage costs in half using the technology, while also reducing idle resources.

“We’re enabling compression and dedupe as part of the service,” said Mark Lohmeyer, vice president and general manager of VMware’s cloud platform business unit. “This doubles storage capacity available to workloads, with storage on very high performance SSDs on AWS.”

VMware also announced availability of its vMotion for Workload Migration tool on VMware Cloud on AWS, support for VMware Horizon that extends on-premises desktop services via the cloud, and integration with AWS CloudFormation and Hashicorp Terraform to enable automated provisioning of software-defined data centers using familiar tools.

Expanded partner program

Finally, VMware said it’s expanding its Partner Network for managed services providers and systems integrators to resell VMware Cloud on AWS. As part of the expansion, VMware says it’s adding a new VMware Cloud on AWS Solution Competency. It’s also expanding its VMware Solution Provider and Cloud Provider programs to include VMware Cloud on AWS.

The expansion is designed to help VMware’s partners obtain the skills they need to help customers manage their hybrid cloud services. It’s also about providing customers with more choices for where to run their workloads and avoid vendor lock-in, officials explained.

“We have over 4,500 partners offering choices for workloads,” said Joe Baguley, VMware’s vice president and chief technology officer for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. “This is increasing the options for customers not to be locked in. Lock-in isn’t a conversation I have with customers.”

With reporting from Paul Gillin

Image: AWS