What’s New with VMware Cloud on AWS GovCloud(US) – New Instance Type, Low Cost Starter Option and New Capability to Securely Protect Workloads on VMware Cloud on AWS GovCloud(US) – VMware Cloud Community

VMware has had a long history of providing federal, state and local government agencies with software products that simplified the operation and management of IT. As a part of this commitment, we announced several exciting service updates on VMware Cloud on AWS GovCloud (US) in February 2020, and VMware Cloud on AWS GovCloud (US) achieved the FedRAMP Ready High designation with Joint Authorization Board (JAB) about six months ago.

As we are continuing with the journey to enable US public sector agencies and private sector customers to securely run production applications across VMware vSphere®-based cloud environments with optimized access to AWS services, now we are excited to announce more new capabilities for VMware Cloud on AWS GovCloud(US) that will help our government customers with storage bound workloads, provide them with lower cost starter option, and help them protect and migrate workloads to AWS GovCloud(US) West region.

New bare-metal instance type with Amazon EC2 i3en.metal for VMware Cloud on AWS GovCloud(US)

The new bare-metal instance type i3en.metal instance is now supported on VMware Cloud on AWS GovCloud(US) clusters for optimizing data-intensive workloads that require high random I/O access .

Based on 2nd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processor, each host offers:

• More compute: 48 physical CPU cores with hyperthreading enabled by default (96 logical cores) compared to 36 physical CPU cores with the i3.metal instance
• More RAM: 768 GiB RAM. This is 1.5X the RAM of an i3.metal instance.
• More raw storage capacity: ~45 TiB of raw NVMe SSD This is >4X of raw storage capacity of i3.metal instance.
• More secure instance type: Data-in-flight encryption at the NIC-level enabled by default for east-west traffic within the VMware Cloud on AWS GovCloud(US) SDDC boundary.
• All data at rest is encrypted with VMware vSAN similar to VMware Cloud on AWS GovCloud(US) SDDC clusters running on the i3.metal instance type.
• Network interface throughput of up to 25 Gbps at the initial release similar to VMware Cloud on AWS GovCloud(US) SDDC clusters running on i3.metal instances.

2-host production cluster

Previously, government customers were required to spin up a production cluster with 3 hosts minimum. With this new capability, now government agencies can deploy production environments with only 2 hosts in a cluster. This capability is available for Amazon EC2 i3.metal hosts only. This lowers the cost of getting started with a minimum production cluster based on the i3.metal instance type by ~33% and further broadens the access of the service to the small and mid-sized government agencies.

VMware Site Recovery (VSR) in GovCloud(US)

VMware Site Recovery for VMware Cloud on AWS GovCloud(US) enables US public sector agencies to protect and migrate their workloads to FedRAMP compliant AWS GovCloud regions in the US. The service automates workload recovery in a Disaster Recovery event between on-premises data centers and VMware Cloud on AWS GovCloud(US), as well as between different instances of VMware Cloud on AWS. Built on top of enterprise-grade DR tools (VMware Site Recovery Manager, vSphere Replication) and AWS GovCloud(US) West region, the service provides an end-to-end disaster recovery solution that is quick to deploy and leverages existing skills and knowledge of Disaster Recovery.

Availability

To view the latest status of features for VMware Cloud on AWS, visit: https://cloud.vmware.com/govcloud/roadmap . Refer to the release notes https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Cloud-on-AWS-GovCloud-(US)/services/rn/VMware-Cloud-on-AWS-GovCloud-US.html for latest updates.

The following capabilities are available today:

New bare-metal instance type with Amazon EC2 i3en.metal for VMware Cloud on AWS GovCloud(US), 2-host production cluster, VMware Site Recovery (VSR) in GovCloud(US)

Resources

            – VMware Cloud on AWS GovCloud (US) Achieves FedRAMP Ready High Designation with the JAB
            – VMware Cloud on AWS GovCloud (US) Service Updates
            – VMware Cloud on AWS GovCloud (US) achieves FedRAMP In-Process at High Impact Level
            – VMware Cloud on AWS GovCloud (US) Initial Availability
            – VMware Cloud on AWS expands to AWS GovCloud (US)