VMware Inc. today debuted an enhanced version of its VMware Cloud on AWS platform that adds support for one of Amazon Web Services Inc.’s newest bare-metal instances. 

The update was announced at the AWS re:Invent 2023 conference in Las Vegas. It will become available in VMware’s fiscal fourth quarter, which runs from November to late January. 

VMware Cloud on AWS is an AWS-optimized version of the virtualization giant’s Cloud Foundation offering. Cloud Foundation, in turn, is a product suite that combines vSphere with several other infrastructure management tools. The product suite allows administrators with experience managing vSphere-powered data centers to run their companies’ AWS environments using a familiar set of tools.

The new release of VMware Cloud on AWS that debuted today can run on the cloud giant’s m7i.metal-24xl instances, which launched in August. The instances are based on a custom central processing unit from Intel Corp.’s latest Sapphire Rapids server chip series. Each machine packs 96 vCPUs and 386 gibibyte of memory, which amounts to about 414 gigabytes.

The m7i.metal-24xl is a so-called bare-metal instance. It lacks some of the AWS-developed software components included in regular instances, which allows customers to more directly access the underlying hardware. Such expanded hardware access is necessary to run certain types of applications and can also ease the task of measuring workload performance.

VMware Cloud on AWS already supports three bare-metal instances in the Amazon.com Inc. unit’s cloud. Those instances all feature a sizable amount of built-in storage capacity. The new m7i.metal-24xl instance for which VMware has added support doesn’t, which could help customers lower their cloud expenses.

If a company rents an instance with a certain amount of capacity but uses only a part of that capacity, the surplus disk space represents an unnecessary expense. Because the m7i.metal-24xl doesn’t have any built-in storage, there’s a lower risk of such cost overruns. Companies can attach external storage in the quantities necessary for their workloads and add or remove capacity as requirements change.

Notably, the m7i.metal-24xl also makes it possible to add storage space without necessarily spinning up additional instances. As a result, companies can avoid provisioning extra instances their applications may not require.

VMware Cloud on AWS allows customers to manage the storage hardware attached to their instances using the virtualization giant’s Cloud Flex Storage service. Customers may also use Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP, a file storage service based on NetApp Inc. software.

Granular capacity provisioning is not the only benefit that the m7i.metal-24xl offers. According to AWS, it provides up to 19% better price-performance than the previous-generation M6i instance series. The m7i.metal-24xl lends itself to running application servers, databases, simple artificial intelligence models and a range of other workloads. 

Image: VMware