We’re excited to share an update on the new capabilities delivered by VMware Cloud on AWS that will further improve your ability to help your customers address their needs for disaster recovery and migrating their data-intensive workloads to the cloud. This latest release includes two major enhancements: support for Amazon EC2 i3en.metal and general availability of 2-host configuration, as well as a number of other improvements in scale, resiliency and ease of operations.

Prior to this announcement, most VMware Cloud on AWS customers were running on Amazon EC2 i3.metal. With this latest release, your customers can experience improved security and higher performance for data-intensive workloads at approximately half the cost per GB of raw storage per host on average when they run on VMware Cloud on AWS with Amazon EC2 i3en.metal, as compared to running it on i3.metal instances. Further, each dollar investment in i3en.metal can potentially yield a 22% increase in performance value over i3.metal. In the context of VMware Cloud on AWS, the i3en.metal performance value is determined by computing average of the per TB, CPU and RAM unit costs and comparing with the same costs for VMware Cloud on AWS running on i3.metal. The i3en.metal instance, which runs on second generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors, offers 30% more logical cores, in-flight and at rest data encryption, 1.5x more RAM and 4x more raw NVMe SSD storage capacity (as compared to i3).

The second major announcement is the general availability of the 2-host configuration. In May, the 2-host configuration was made available in preview. Now, we’re happy to let you know the 2-host configuration is generally available.  The main difference between preview and general availability is the service level agreement (SLA). The 2-host configuration is now offered with the same SLA that is offered on the 3+ host configuration.

The 2-host configuration allows you to offer your customers a lower entry price for VMware Cloud on AWS, 33% lower than the 3-host configuration. This makes it more affordable for your customers to get started. If you had customers in the past who showed interest in VMware Cloud on AWS, but the initial cost was too high, now is a great time to reach out to them with this new, lower cost configuration. Also, the 2-node configuration is eligible for the Jump Start discount program, which is a limited time, 30% discount for product demos, development, testing, solution validation and internal training.

This release also includes a number of other new capabilities for VMware Cloud on AWS–including one-click activation of VMware vRealize Automation Cloud for VMware Cloud on AWS, enhancements with VMware Site Recovery and new capabilities with VMware vRealize Log Insight Cloud. For more details, read the latest post: What’s new with VMware Cloud on AWS – New instance type and more capabilities for automation and ease of operations.

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