Amazon Makes it Easier for VMware Pros to Use vCenter Portal

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is following up on its June announcement that pitted the company’s infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform directly against VMware‘s (VMW) cloud offerings. The public cloud giant has updated its AWS Management Portal for vCenter with enhancements that the company promises makes it easier for VMware professionals to set up and and start managing AWS resources using their vSphere client.

In a blog post, Derek Lyon, a principal product manager at Amazon Web Services, detailed a handful of changes and enhancements to the vCenter management portal, including:

• A new setup option designed to reduce significantly the complexity of the setup of the portal. Amazon added a new federation proxy option that provides users with the ability to use the portal without having to set up SAML integration themselves. It enables users to use the AWS Connector as an authentication proxy. “This provides an easy way to offer end users federated access to your AWS resources via the portal. With the proxy option, your end users will access the portal using the same credentials they use to login to vCenter, with support for both system domain users and directory users,” Lyon wrote. Previously, the portal only supported SAML-based authentication.
• The ability to reset the configuration. A new option within the setup provides the ability to reset the portal’s configuration. Users that have previously set up the portal using SAML and would like to use the new federation proxy (or who would like to start from scratch again) can use the tool to completely reset the configuration. 
• Management of existing Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances. Users can now make use of the AWS Management Portal for vCenter to manage EC2 instances, which now show up under Default Environment in the portal’s dashboard. “If you are already using AWS and are looking to add the ability to manage your instances through the portal, this makes it easy to keep track of all of your instances, whether or not you created them through the portal,” Lyon wrote.