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VMware on AWS just got cheaper and gruntier. But you can only choose one

Yet Virtzilla still won't say how many paying punters are actually using its Amazonian cloud

VMware has made some notable tweaks to its AWS-powered cloud service.

It's now possible to run VMware Cloud on AWS, which VMware calls "VMC", on just two hosts. That's a reduction of one whole host, which VMware claimed will slice costs by a third. Given that the lowest price for a single host is currently $120,584 over three years, that's a decent saving.

VMware said it thinks the change will make the service more attractive to smaller users, telling The Register that a two-host rig should suffice for users with between 50 and 70 regulation-sized VMs.

Another cost-saver will be made from a new VMware Cloud Director service that enables managed service providers (MSPs) to buy VMC and then parcel it out to multiple tenants. The tool has been enhanced to handle between five and 10 times more clients. This matters because VMware has viewed MSPs as the way it can sell VMC to small organisations. Such shops may not even know they're using VMC because they're the sort of outfit that engages an MSP to take care of IT.

If you fancy spending more on VMC, VMware has an option for that to in the form of a new instance type: the i3en.metal packs a second-generation Xeon Scalable CPU, provides 48 cores at 2.5GHz and comes with 45 terabytes of raw NVMe SSD. Unsurprisingly, this is aimed at databases and other applications that demand a fair wodge of storage.

VMware has made sure its new Tanzu Application Grid K8s implementation plays nicely on VMC, and also tweaked its NSX network virtualization stack so that it can now create virtual nets that span VMC, AWS virtual private clouds and on-prem VMware environments. The latter features, dubbed "VMware Transit Connect", are currently in preview and require manual configuration. More elegant improvements are expected.

While VMC continues to evolve apace, VMware has been being cagey about how many users have signed up for the service. The company said that host count has risen 2.5 times year-on-year and that VM count is up 3.5 times over the same period. It's possible that's why it has now made the service cheaper. ®

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