VMware announced sometime back the availability to rent bare-metal vSphere hosts in an AWS data center, with such perks as the (included) ability to stretch from your existing data center and “local” no-egress-charge access to AWS features like S3.
They recently announced a single-host version available for testing, with a few caveats:
$7 per hour and if you want to stop the charge you have to delete your SDDC. If you don’t delete is $5k for the month.
Takes about 2 hours to deploy/redeploy an SDDC.
You can’t have an single-host SDDC running more than 30 days – it will automatically be deleted and erase all data.
You need to have an AWS account as well – and you want to make sure your services are in the same VPC/AZ to keep egress costs down if you use AWS services.
You can upgrade to a 4-host SDDC at any time, but the price is $33.47/hr if you don’t reserve a year or three.
You can skip over to https://cloud.vmware.com/vmc-aws and hit “Get Started”
VMware has a video to walk you thorough kicking it off correctly
I hope to have some posts shortly demoing some of the features like HCX and IPSec back to on -prem and moving VMs to/from S3.
