Longtime rivals VMware Inc. and Amazon Web Services Inc. are looking even chummier these days as the companies expand their landmark partnership announced last year to make it easier for VMware customers to move their workloads easily to the Amazon cloud.

Today at the AWS re:Invent conference running this week in Las Vegas, the companies announced a new migration product that they said makes it possible for enterprises to shift workloads to the cloud with zero downtime and the option to continue using the management and monitoring tools they’re accustomed to on-premises.

The linkup with Amazon that was jointly announced by AWS Chief Executive Andy Jassy (pictured, left) and VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger (right) a little over a year ago gives VMware a viable cloud strategy after its own attempts to build a public cloud failed and the company formally exited the hybrid cloud hosting business in April. The partnership with Amazon has benefits for both parties. VMware has an enviable roster of enterprise customers that Amazon covets, while Amazon has the kind of growth and momentum that VMware would like to regain.

Many longtime VMware customers have balked at the idea of moving existing workloads to the cloud after spending years fine-tuning them. With the new features announced today, VMware appears to be all but inviting them to make the shift.

VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension is a software-as-a-service offering for VMware Cloud on AWS that supports large-scale migration of workloads running on vSphere 5.0 and newer versions without the need for testing or new tooling. Customers can continue to run VMware’s vSphere, VSAN and NSX in the AWS cloud. They can also choose where to run workloads based on capacity and business needs and shift workloads quickly over layer 2 networks using VMware vMotion.

New support for the network monitoring software VMware picked up with the acquisition of  Wavefront Inc. in the spring gives VMware Cloud Service users the ability to visualize and troubleshoot applications running on VMware Cloud on AWS as they would in their own data centers. The combination of new products eliminates the need for extensive application dependency mapping when migrating applications while also providing data synchronization, traffic analysis, wide-area network optimization and virtual private network connectivity, all features that should appeal to performance-and security-conscious enterprises.

For East Coast customers, which include lots of financial services, pharmaceutical and educational institutions, the companies said VMware Cloud on AWS will now be available in the AWS U.S. East region based in northern Virginia. Availability was previously limited to Amazon’s U.S. West region based in Oregon.

Safe passage

“With the combination of the hybrid interconnect and layer 2 extensions, customers will be able to on-board applications to the cloud while remaining tethered to their on-premises data centers,” Allwyn Sequeira, senior vice president and general manager of hybrid services at VMware, wrote in a blog post.

VMware is further sweetening the pot with one-year and three-year subscription options that should be significantly cheaper than the standard Amazon hourly pricing model. The company said the subscription options can lower total cost of ownership by up to 50 percent compared to on-demand pricing. There are even more cost-saving incentives for members of VMware’s Hybrid Loyalty Program.

To ease the migration further, VMware announced a new backup and recovery service for VMware Cloud on AWS customers that eliminates the need for a secondary disaster recovery site by enabling customers to use their existing cloud infrastructure for failover from their data centers with minimal disruption. This enables VMware users to step lightly into the cloud using backup data as a test bed.

VMware Cloud on AWS supports 32 host clusters and multiple software-defined data centers  per organization today, and will soon support 10 clusters per SDDC, enabling environments to be built with tens of thousands of virtual machines, VMware said.

VMware Site Recovery is available today. Other products are planned to be released by the end of January. VMware maintains a status page on the various components of the AWS partnership.

Image: Seth MacMillan/SiliconANGLE