Announcing the General Availability of Next-Generation Alibaba Cloud VMware Service

We are excited the announce the general availability of Alibaba Cloud VMware Service. This service is jointly developed by VMware and Alibaba Cloud to help customers accelerate their digital transformation journey to the public cloud in the Greater China region.

Alibaba Cloud, the data intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, is among the world’s top three IaaS providers and the largest provider of public cloud services in China. The partnership with VMware was announced in 2018 to deliver a hybrid cloud service that brings VMware Cloud technologies, such as VMware vSphere, vSAN, and NSX, to Alibaba public cloud. Today’s announcement reflects the commitment of both companies to enable our global customers to innovate, grow, and cost-effectively expand into new markets.

What is Alibaba Cloud VMware Service?

Alibaba Cloud VMware Service integrates VMware on-premises tools, skillsets, and processes, delivering a vSphere-based, dedicated infrastructure cloud service in Alibaba public cloud. Alibaba Cloud VMware Service allows organizations to access the scale and agility of the Alibaba Cloud while leveraging familiar VMware enterprise infrastructure and management capabilities. Alibaba Cloud deploys, operates, manages the life-cycle, and supports the VMware Software Defined Data Center (SDDC). Alibaba Cloud VMware Service empowers enterprises to reduce operational complexity and mitigate operational risk while customers can focus on delivering value-added services. 

Alibaba Cloud VMware Service leverages VMware compute, storage, network virtualization products, and centralized management functions deployed to Alibaba bare-metal hosts. This consistent and unified cloud infrastructure enables organizations to seamlessly migrate workloads between on-premises and Alibaba Cloud at scale. Businesses can quickly migrate and access VM resources using familiar VMware tools without rearchitecting applications or retooling operations. Once in the Cloud, customers can leverage Alibaba Cloud’s industry-leading flexible, cost-effective, and secure services, such as Compute Service and Relational Databases, which offer on-demand and subscription payment modes.

Why Alibaba Cloud VMware Service?

• Unified platform: Transfer applications with fully automated provisioning and life-cycle management. Delivered by the same vSphere-based SDDC that you use on-premises without rearchitecting or refactoring applications.
• Seamless integration: Fully integrated control plane with Alibaba Cloud native console and monitoring panel.
• Accelerated migration: Migrate your workloads without retrofit or disruption, reducing migration effort from months to weeks.
• High Speed and Secure Cloud Network: 99.9% SLA for both SDDC instance availability and management components globally with VMware NSX, L2-L4 network security.
• Consistent operations: Based on vSphere and vCenter APIs so your existing VMware and third-party tools continue to work without the need for re-training.
• Security and compliances: Deploy existing or new applications with the only China-based cloud provider that meets regulatory export control and data privacy requirements across the Asia Pacific, Europe, and North America. 

There are three primary use cases that we’ve seen from the customers:

Cloud Migration

For customers who want to start with a fast and low-cost migration to transform existing workloads to the cloud or refresh infrastructure due to hardware end of life, Alibaba Cloud VMware Service offers a consistent and enterprise-class cloud service that brings the best VMware technologies to Alibaba Cloud.

Data Center Extension

Customers want to scale their data center capacity, handle unplanned temporary capacity needs for new projects, or have a need to perform test/development activities in a cloud environment. You can choose Alibaba Cloud VMware Service to extend your data center with consistency and agility.

Disaster Recovery

We’ve seen scenarios like new DR implementation, the secondary DR site cost reduction, and additional workloads protection with a cloud-based DR solution. Disaster recovery, delivered as a service for Alibaba Cloud VMware Service, provides on-demand site protection with native automated orchestration, failover, and failback capabilities.

Application Modernization

For customers who want to modernize enterprise applications faster. Combine Kubernetes, popular developer tools and frameworks, and access to native Alibaba Cloud services to achieve a fast path to production for applications.

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